Toward the end of 1962, the Strangler’s MO suddenly changed. He began preying on much younger women. And his murders became even more vicious—and bizarre. In one instance, he stabbed his victim nearly two dozen times. He left another corpse propped against the headboard of her bed, a pink bow tied around her neck, a broomstick handle jutting from her vagina, and a Happy New Year’s card resting against her left foot.
Eventually, DeSalvo was arrested not for the Boston Strangler murders but for one of the Green Man rapes. During a stint at a state mental hospital, however, he began boasting of his strangling career to a fellow inmate. Only then did authorities discover that they had unwittingly nabbed the infamous killer.
In the end, DeSalvo was never punished for the Boston Strangler crimes. Through a deal struck by his lawyer—F. Lee Bailey—DeSalvo was spared the chair and given a life sentence for the Green Man rapes instead. Not that Bailey’s efforts did DeSalvo much good in the end. He was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate in November 1973.
DeSalvo’s death, however, was not the end of the story. For years, questions about his guilt swirled around the case. Some skeptics believed that DeSalvo confessed for mercenary motives—i.e., because he believed he’d profit from book and movie rights. Others remained convinced there was more than one Strangler.
In 2001, forensic experts lent support to the doubters when DNA taken from the exhumed corpse of the Strangler’s last victim did not provide a match with DeSalvo. The controversy over his involvement in the other ten cases, however, rages unabated. Whether science will ever be able to resolve the issue of his guilt remains to be seen.
“Me? I wouldn’t hurt no broads. I love broads.”
ALBERT “BOSTON STRANGLER” DESALVO
DISPOSAL
To get away with gruesome murder again and again, a serial killer has to possess a fairly high degree of fiendish cunning. Snaring a victim is the first challenge he has to meet. Once he has perpetrated his atrocities, he is faced with another, even more pressing problem—what to do with the remains. The solutions to this grisly dilemma range from the straightforward to the diabolically elaborate.
Some serial killers simply leave their victims where they lie, occasionally taking the time to wreak some grotesque indignity on the remains. For example, Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” liked to tie big ornamental bows around the throats of his female victims, as though he were leaving a gift-wrapped present for the police.
DeSalvo’s bizarre bow-tying practice made for an unmistakable “signature.” Understandably enough, many other homicidal maniacs prefer to leave no trace of their identities at all. For some sociopaths, the simplest approach to corpse disposal is the best. Ted Bundy, the “Hillside Stranglers,” and the Green River Killer, for example, simply dumped the bodies of their victims out in the open—in forests, along riverbanks, on the slopes bordering freeways. Others made perfunctory attempts at concealment, burying the bodies in shallow graves or shovelling dead leaves over the remains. John Wayne Gacy didn’t even bother to leave home. He simply stuck the dead bodies of his young male victims under the crawl space of his house—at least until he ran out of room, at which point he began tossing them into a nearby river.
By contrast, there are some serial killers who go to great lengths to obliterate every trace of their victims, often by immersing the bodies in acid, covering them with Quicklime, or incinerating them in Ovens.
Then there are those serial killers whose disposal methods can best be described as wildly (if not insanely) unorthodox. Joe Ball, for example, got rid of his murdered mistresses by feeding their flesh to his pet Alligators, while the monstrous Fritz Haarmann chopped up his victims and sold their flesh to his neighbors, passing it off as black-market beef.
The longer a serial killer remains on the loose, of course, the more proficient he tends to become. With corpse disposal, as with most human skills, practice makes perfect. Special agents of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit describe one serial killer who was thrown into a state of almost panicky confusion when faced with the ravaged remains of his first victim. By the time he committed his second homicide, he had already worked out a sophisticated disposal method, taking four painstaking hours to dismember the body in his bathroom before bagging up the parts and depositing them in supermarket Dumpsters.
Of course, there are some serial killers who prefer not to dispose of their victims at all. Both Dennis Nilsen and his American counterpart, Jeffrey Dahmer, were so desperate for companionship that they went to great, highly deranged lengths to keep the corpses close by. Of course, since both men occupied cramped apartments, even they had to face up to the fetid reality after a while and get rid of their rotting house guests. Nilsen’s solution was sublime in its simplicity, if not entirely practical—he chopped up the bodies and flushed the chunks down the toilet, a method that eventually led to his arrest when the plumbing in his apartment building became clogged with gobs of decomposing human flesh.
DOCTORS
From Dr. Jekyll to Dr. Lecter, the fiendish physician has long been a staple of horror fantasy. Unfortunately, this nightmarish figure is not just a figment of the pop imagination. The annals of crime contain notable examples of psychopathic M.D.’s who stand the Hippocratic Oath on its head by using their skills to do harm.
“I got a dead body on my hands. People saw me come in here. How am I going to pack this one out? Am I gonna put it in a double bag or a sheet and carry it out of here? I figured the smaller the better. I chopped the body up, stuffed some in the refrigerator, dumped the guts in a vacant lot, throwing pieces here and there, whatever came out of the bag first. I was scared.”
Anonymous serial killer,
describing his first experience with body disposal
Given his dexterity at dissection, there has always been speculation that Jack the Ripper—the first and most famous of modern serial killers—was someone with surgical training. “Ripperologists” have come up with several candidates: a Russian doctor and homicidal maniac named Michael Ostrog, who ended up in a mental asylum; another Russian, Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, described as a “criminal lunatic” exiled to London by the tsar’s secret police; and an English surgeon named Stanley who allegedly confessed to the Whitechapel murders on his deathbed.
Jack’s contemporary, H. H. Holmes, was America’s original M.D.—i.e., Medical Deviate. After receiving his degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Holmes made his way to Chicago, where he constructed his notorious “Murder Castle,” complete with a basement dissection lab. Though Holmes worked as a pharmacist, not a physician, he was able to put his surgical training to profitable use by selling the stripped and mounted skeletons of his victims to local anatomy schools.
At roughly the same time, a British psychopath named Thomas Neill Cream—who received his medical degree from Montreal’s McGill University and did postgraduate work at the prestigious Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons at Edinburgh—was busily dispatching victims on both sides of the Atlantic. After killing several women through botched, illegal abortions, Dr. Cream—who was residing in Chicago at the time—poisoned his mistress’s husband by lacing the man’s epilepsy medicine with strychnine. Released after a ten-year stint in Joliet, he sailed for England, where he embarked on a career as a serial killer of prostitutes—poisoning five London streetwalkers before he was caught, tried, and hanged in 1892. Dr. Cream is regarded as another Ripper candidate, since he is reputed to have cried, “I am Jack the—”just as he plunged through the trapdoor of the gallows.
Herman Mudgett, aka Dr. H. H. Holmes; from True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright
(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)
Fifty years later and across the English Channel, residents of the Rue Le Sueur in Paris were assaulted by an overpowering stench issuing from a neighborhood building. When firemen broke in, they were horrified to discover a stack of dismembered bodies decomposing in the
basement. The building, it turned out, belonged to Dr. Marcel Petiot, who claimed that the corpses were those of Nazi collaborators killed by the Resistance. It wasn’t until the war ended that the appalling truth emerged: the victims were actually wealthy French Jews, desperate to flee Nazi-occupied France. Posing as a Resistance member who would smuggle them to freedom—for a fee—Petiot arranged to have the unsuspecting victims arrive at his house with all their valuables. Then he would administer an “immunization shot”—actually a lethal injection of strychnine—lock them in a chamber (where, through a peephole, he could watch them die in agony), appropriate their belongings, and dispose of their remains in his furnace. Unrepentant to the end, Dr. Petiot went to the guillotine with a smile in 1946.
Some of the most notorious serial killers of recent years have been physicians. Though convicted of only three murders, Dr. Michael Swango—a classic psychopath who confessed to feeling turned on by the “sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide”—is believed to have dispatched as many as sixty victims, all of them recuperating hospital patients who suffered sudden mysterious heart seizures while under his “care.” (The story of Swango—and the American medical establishment that willfully ignored his nefarious doings—is brilliantly told in James Stewart’s 2000 bestseller, Blind Eye.) Even more appalling was Dr. Harold Shipman, who took more innocent lives than any other killer in the annals of British crime.
Dr. Death
No one will ever know exactly how many lives were taken by Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman during the years he treated patients in northern England. A total of 459 people died under his care, but some of those surely perished of natural causes. The most reliable estimate is that, between 1971 and 1998, the genial general practitioner committed no fewer than 250 murders, making him the most prolific serial killer in British—and possibly world—history. (See Records.)
The vast majority of his victims were elderly women, who warmed to his charming bedside manner. Shipman’s MO was always the same. He would pay an unexpected afternoon house call on a fairly healthy patient, kill her with an injection of the painkiller diamorphine (medical-grade heroin, legal in the U.K.), then hurry away. Later—often summoned by a frantic call from a relative who had discovered the corpse—he would return and sign the death certificate, attributing the unexpected death to natural causes.
It was not until 1997 that someone—a woman named Debbie Brambroffe, the daughter of the local undertaker—realized that something sinister was going on. Struck by the unusually high death rate among Dr. Shipman’s elderly female patients—and by the bizarre fact that their bodies were invariably found fully dressed and seated in their favorite easy chairs or resting on the settee—Ms. Brambroffe shared her suspicions with another local physician, Dr. Susan Booth. Before long, an investigation was under way.
Though Shipman became aware that authorities had begun to examine the death certificates of his patients, he could not stop killing. He was finally caught after murdering an unusually fit octogenarian, Mrs. Kathleen Grundy, then crudely forging a will in her name that left him her entire fortune of nearly $400,000. As soon as Mrs. Grundy’s daughter set eyes on the document, she saw it was a fake and contacted the police, who already had Shipman in their sights. Before long, Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed and autopsied. When lethal amounts of diamorphine were discovered, Shipman was arrested.
What drove him to kill? Some psychiatrists claim that Shipman was unusually attached to his mother and deeply traumatized by witnessing her slow death from cancer when he was in his teens. According to this theory, the sight of the family physician administering morphine injections to ease her final agonies left an indelible mark on his psyche, one that drove him, in later life, to re-create that traumatic scene again and again. At Shipman’s trial in January 2000, the prosecuting attorney, Richard Henriques, offered a simpler explanation: Shipman killed for pleasure. “He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death,” argued Henriques, “and repeated the act so often he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste.”
Shipman, who consistently denied his guilt, was convicted of killing fifteen patients and sentenced to life in prison. On January 13, 2004—one day before his fifty-eighth birthday—he took one final life: his own. He hanged himself with his bedsheets from the bars of his cell—an act applauded by the British tabloids, which urged other incarcerated serial killers to follow Shipman’s example.
ESCAPE
With their diabolical cunning, serial killers are often able to elude the law for long periods of time—months, years, sometimes forever (see Whereabouts Unknown). There have also been a number of notorious serial killers who have been captured after massive manhunts, only to pull off successful escapes.
Back in the 1920s, when Harry Houdini was wowing audiences by miraculously extricating himself from submerged steamer trunks, buried coffins, and other apparently escape-proof receptacles, Earle Leonard Nelson contrived some impressive feats of his own. Sentenced to a state mental asylum, he managed to break out so often that the authorities finally gave up trying to recapture him. In 1926, Nelson embarked on his lethal career as a serial rapist and strangler, a terrifying figure who came to be known as the “Gorilla Murderer.” After committing a score of murders across the United States, he made his way up into Canada, where the police finally apprehended him. Nelson was taken to Killarney jail, stripped of his boots, and tossed into a double-locked cell. Left unguarded for fifteen minutes, he somehow managed to escape, setting off a citywide panic and the largest manhunt in Manitoba history, which ended when he was recaptured less than twelve hours later.
Perhaps the most fear-provoking escape ever engineered by a serial killer occurred in 1967 when Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” slipped out of custody. Countless women barricaded themselves in their homes as terror gripped New England. As it turned out, however, DeSalvo’s escape was a symbolic act, not a serious attempt to break free and resume his career of crime. DeSalvo was unhappy with his lack of psychiatric treatment, and the escape was his way of protesting. When police finally caught up with him, he made no effort to resist.
Just one year earlier, a psychopathic runt named Charles Schmid, who came to be known as the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” was sentenced to fifty-five years in prison for the rape-murder of a fifteen-year-old girl, one of his three teenaged victims. Five years after his conviction, Schmid managed to break out of prison. Before he was recaptured a few days later, there were some very nervous people in Arizona. At his trial, Schmid had vowed to “get the people” who had testified against him.
One of the most cunning of all modern serial killers was Ted Bundy. In January 1977, Bundy was extradited to Colorado to stand trial for murder. Since Bundy (who had been a law student in Utah) insisted on overseeing his own defense, he was allowed access to the law library at the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen. On the morning of June 7, 1977, after being left alone in the library for a few minutes, Bundy leapt to freedom through an open second-story window. He was back in custody a few days later, but in late December of that year, he managed to saw a hole in the ceiling of his jail cell and escape. This time, he eluded the authorities for more than a month. Before he was captured again, in mid-February 1978, he had made his way to Florida and brutally murdered three more young women.
EVIL
The atrocities committed by some serial killers are so extreme—torturing children while tape-recording their agonized pleas for help, drilling holes in the skulls of living victims and injecting their brains with acid to turn them into “sex Zombies,” castrating boys and forcing them to eat their own genitals—that, in attempting to account for such behavior, some forensic psychiatrists have thrown up their hands and resorted to an age-old explanation: pure, elemental evil.
One of these experts is Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia University, who, after studying the biographies of several hundred British and American serial killers, concluded that while some were clearly suffering f
rom severe mental illness, many others were technically sane; their ghastly crimes were committed for sheer pleasure. According to Stone, these beings—Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Moors Murderer Ian Brady, among others—cannot be diagnosed according to the usual psychiatric categories: malignant narcissism, criminal psychopathology, antisocial personality disorder, etc. “Such people make a rational choice to commit terrible crimes over and over again,” says Stone. “They are evil, and we should be able to say that formally.”
Not everyone agrees. Some of Stone’s peers believe that talking of evil smacks of medieval superstition. The well-known forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, for example, says of serial killers that “As far as we can tell, the causes of their behavior are biological, psychological, and social, and so far do not demonstrably include the work of Lucifer.”
Others, however, side with Stone in what has been called the “mad or bad” debate. These forensic specialists believe that only one concept can adequately describe creatures like Fred and Rose West, the British Killer Couple who raped, tortured, and murdered a string of young victims, including several of their own children.
Evil, plain and simple.
EXCREMENT
It’s hard to say which of the many Paraphilias practiced by serial killers is the most disgusting, though coprophagy—i.e., deriving sexual pleasure from eating feces—clearly ranks high on the list. Needless to say, this was a favorite pastime of the monstrously perverted Albert Fish. During Fish’s 1935 trial for the cannibal murder of little Gracie Budd, his attorney cited the old man’s fondness for eating human excrement as evidence of his extreme abnormality. The prosecution countered by calling a psychiatrist who insisted many “very successful people, successful artists, successful teachers, successful financiers” regularly engaged in the same activity. Such people, he declared, were “socially perfectly all right”—a bit of testimony that left many spectators wondering who was crazier, Fish or the supposed expert witness.
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 8