Among the most notorious of these pernicious partnerships are Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, two wildly vicious sadists who raped, tortured, and murdered a string of victims in a specially designed concrete bunker in northern California during the early 1980s; Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, another deadly California duo who abducted and killed a half-dozen teenage girls in a customized van they dubbed “Murder Mack”; and the “Hillside Stranglers.”
A significant number of folies à deux involve male-female couples. In cases like these it is usually the man who instigates the crimes and the woman who serves as his willing, even eager, accomplice. For more on this phenomenon see Killer Couples.
FOREIGNERS
America may no longer be the world’s leading manufacturer of cars, cameras, and color TVs, but we’re still way ahead of the pack when it comes to serial killers. Not only do we turn them out in far greater quantity than any other civilized nation, we’ve also produced most of the really big-name psychos of the late twentieth century: Manson, Bundy, Gacy, et al. Still, it would be the height of chauvinism to believe that the United States of America is the only country capable of creating homicidal sex maniacs.
From the days of Jack the Ripper, Great Britain has been home to lots of serial killers (see Rippers). In the past few decades alone, Shakespeare’s “blessed isle” has produced a number of world-class psychos, including the unspeakably heinous Fred and Rosemary West (see Killer Couples) and Dr. Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in history (see Records). France, too, has produced its fair share—from Joseph Vacher to Dr. Marcel Petiot to Thierry Paulin (the “Monster of Montmartre,” who murdered at least twenty old ladies in the mid-1980s). Some of the most monstrous lust murderers in history, including Peter Kürten and Fritz Haarmann, were born and bred in Germany. Among Italian homicidal maniacs, special mention must be made of the “Monster of Florence,” a sexually sadistic Lovers’ Lane killer who preyed mostly on young couples in the 1970s and 1980s. Even Belgium, the last place on earth you’d expect to find serial killers, has turned out some scary specimens. In the 1930s, for example, a serial poisoner named Marie Becker knocked off a dozen people (Becker had a knack for picturesque descriptions. During her trial, she told the judge that one of her female victims resembled “an angel choked on sauerkraut.”) More recently, a Belgian pedophile, Marc Dutroux, was at the center of a scandal involving child abduction and serial murder.
With all of these killers in Western Europe (to say nothing of the U.S.), can serial murder be seen as a symptom of capitalist decadence? That’s certainly what Soviet officials used to claim. Their position was somewhat undermined, however, when the victims of Andrei Chikatilo, the “Beast of Rostov,” began piling up. Nor did a Communist social system prevent China from producing at least one notorious sex slayer, Lu Wenxian, aka the “Guangzhou Ripper,” responsible for thirteen mutilation murders in the early 1990s. There is reason to suspect that there have been other serial killers in China, though it’s unlikely that the world will ever hear about their crimes, since that’s not the sort of news a state-controlled media tends to play up.
For such a sparsely populated country, Australia has turned out a surprising number of serial murderers, including “Granny Killer” John Wayne Glover, Edward Leonski (aka the “Singing Strangler”), and William McDonald, the “Sydney Mutilator.” South America can lay claim to having produced the terrifyingly prolific Pedro Lopez, the “Monster of the Andes,” responsible for the deaths of as many as three hundred young girls in Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.
In South Africa, a soft-spoken ex-convict named Morris Sithole slaughtered thirty-eight young women between January and October 1995, a case that received international attention, particularly after FBI “mindhunter” Robert Ressler was brought in as a consultant. The Japanese take justifiable pride in the safety of their society, but during the 1940s, a former naval officer named Yoshio Kodaira confessed to the rape-murder of seven women. More recently, the country was rocked by the case of the “Kobe School Killer,” an underage psycho who placed the severed head of an eleven-year-old boy by the entrance of a junior high school, along with a taunting note stuffed in the victim’s mouth.
From Norway to New Zealand, Portugal to Pakistan, serial murder is clearly an international phenomenon. To paraphrase the song, it’s an appalling world after all.
The Iranian Spider
Here’s a philosophical conundrum: Is serial murder a crime if the perpetrator lives in a society where people condone—even applaud—his behavior? That was the issue surrounding the case of Iranian sex killer Saeed Hanaei.
For more than a year, the thirty-five-year-old construction worker trolled the streets of the holy city of Mashhad, luring sixteen prostitutes to his home, where they were strangled with their scarves, then wrapped in their black chadors and dumped by the roadside or in open sewers. Arrested in July 2001, Hanaei—known as the “Spider” for his skill at snaring victims—displayed not a trace of remorse. On the contrary, he took positive pride in his crimes, describing himself as a holy crusader against sin and corruption. “I realized God looked favorably upon me, that he had taken notice of my work,” proclaimed Hanaei, who described himself as an “anti-streetwalker activist.”
To be sure, other “harlot killers” have felt they were doing God’s work. The “Yorkshire Ripper,” Peter Sutcliffe, for example, believed that he was “just cleaning the streets” by slaughtering prostitutes. And the German lust murderer, Heinrich Pommerencke was inspired to go out and butcher “sinful” women after watching the Golden Calf sequence in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.
In Western nations, however, such psychopaths tend not to receive widespread, enthusiastic support for their malevolent acts of misogyny. The case was different in Iran, where Hanaei became a folk hero to religious hardliners, who rallied to his defense, arguing that his victims were a “waste of blood” and that, in disposing of them, Hanaei was only obeying Islamic law.
Their support waned only after Hanaei revealed that he had had sex with the women before killing them. He went to the gallows in April 2002, convinced to the bitter end that his ideological allies would step in at the last minute and save him.
Hanaei’s case is the subject of Maziar Bahari’s fascinating 2002 documentary, And Along Came a Spider, which explores his crimes in the context of a society bitterly torn between fundamentalism and reform.
Was Jack the Ripper Really a Yank?
Forget Shakespeare, Churchill, and the Beatles. As far as crime buffs are concerned, the most significant Englishman of all time was Jack the Ripper. There’s only one problem with this belief. According to a pair of writers named Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey, Saucy Jack was really an American!
In their 1995 book, The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper, Evans and Gainey argue that the legendary “Whitechapel Monster” was actually an Irish-American quack, Dr. Francis Tumberty. A bizarre personality who had once been arrested for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Tumberty was a self-confessed woman hater. He had developed a grudge against the opposite sex after discovering that his wife was moonlighting as a prostitute. Among his other eccentricities, he kept a personal collection of preserved female organs, which he liked to display to his guests during dinner parties.
While residing in London in the late 1880s, Tumberty became a prime suspect in the Ripper crimes. Arrested in mid-November 1888—just days after what turned out to be the last of the Whitechapel murders—he was held for a week before being bailed out by loyal employees. Hopping a steamer back to the States, he holed up in his Manhattan apartment, then disappeared again with Scotland Yard inspectors still hot on his trail. Not long afterward, a series of grisly prostitute murders—identical in method to the Whitechapel slayings—occurred in Jamaica and later in Managua, Nicaragua. Evans and Gainey believe that Tumberty was responsible, making him “the world’s first traveling serial killer.”
John Wayne Gacy
> John Wayne Gacy; from Murderers! trading card set
(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)
John Wayne Gacy was a man of many masks. There was the mask of masculinity. To live up to the two-fisted name bestowed by his tyrannical father, Gacy cultivated a gruff, swaggering air. There was the mask of middle-class respectability, symbolized by his tidy ranch-style house in a Chicago suburb. He even wore a literal mask, making himself up as a grinning clown called Pogo to entertain hospitalized children.
But Gacy was one of the most monstrously divided sociopaths in the annals of crime, and his masks concealed a hideous reality. Beneath his “man’s man” persona, he was a tormented, self-loathing homosexual who preyed on young males. Beneath the smiling face, he was a leering, implacable sadist. Beneath the crawl space of his suburban house, more than two dozen corpses moldered in the slime.
Raised by an abusive, alcoholic father—who spent much of his time deriding his son as a sissy—Gacy grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-hatred. He also possessed a terrifyingly antisocial personality.
For a long time, however, he managed to conceal his real character beneath the veneer of an ambitious Middle American businessman. By the time he was twenty-two, he was a married man and father, a highly respected member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the successful manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Waterloo, Iowa. But he was also leading a secret life as a seducer and molester of young males. In 1968, after being arrested on a sodomy charge, he was hit with a ten-year sentence, though he proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after only eighteen months.
Gacy—whose first wife had divorced him on the day of his sentencing—relocated to Chicago, where he soon reestablished himself as an apparent pillar of the community, remarrying, starting a thriving contracting business, becoming active in local politics (on one occasion, he was photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter). Before long, however, his darkest impulses reasserted themselves—this time in an even ghastlier form. He became a human predator who tortured and murdered his young male pickups for his own depraved pleasure.
Cruising the streets for hustlers, drifters, and runaways, Gacy (who sometimes coerced them into his car by posing as a plainclothes cop) would bring them back to his house. There he would handcuff them and then subject them to hours of rape and torture before strangling them slowly. Their bodies would end up in the crawl space of his house.
In 1978, police finally set their sights on the civic-minded contractor when a teenage boy dropped out of sight after telling friends that he was on his way to see Gacy about a job. Digging into Gacy’s past, police uncovered records of his previous sex offenses. In the fetid muck of his crawl space, they exhumed the decomposing remains of twenty-seven victims. Gacy had buried two more elsewhere on his property and dumped another four corpses in a nearby river, bringing the number of his victims to thirty-three.
At first, Gacy maintained that he was the victim of multiple personality disorder, and that his atrocities were actually the work of an evil alter ego named Jack. But the ploy didn’t work. He was given the death sentence in 1980. After fourteen years on death row, the “Killer Clown” was finally executed by lethal injection.
Edward Gein
Ed Gein
(AP/Wide World Photos)
If a serial killer is defined as someone who murders at least three victims over an extended period of time, then—strictly speaking—Edward Gein was not a serial killer, since he appears to have murdered no more than two women. And yet his crimes were so grotesque and appalling that they have haunted America for almost forty years.
Gein was raised by a fanatical, domineering mother who ranted incessantly about the sinful nature of her own sex. When she died in 1945, her son was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. Boarding up her room, he preserved it as though it were a shrine. The rest of the house, however, soon degenerated into a madman’s shambles.
When Gein wasn’t earning his meager living doing odd jobs for neighbors, he passed his lonely hours poring over lurid magazine pieces about sex-change operations, South Seas headhunters, and Nazi atrocities. His own atrocities began a few years after his mother’s death. Driven by his desperate loneliness—and burgeoning psychosis—he started making nocturnal raids on local graveyards, digging up the bodies of middle-aged women and bringing them back to his remote farmhouse. In 1954, he augmented his necrophiliac activities with murder, shooting a local tavern keeper named Mary Hogan and absconding with her two-hundred-pound corpse. Three years later—on the first day of hunting season, 1957—he killed another local woman, a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother who owned the village hardware store.
Ed Gein exhuming a corpse; art by Chris Pelletiere
Suspicion immediately lighted on Gein, who had been hanging around the store in recent days. Breaking into his summer kitchen, police discovered the victim’s headless and gutted corpse suspended upside-down from a rafter like a dressed-out game animal. Inside the house itself, the stunned searchers uncovered a large assortment of unspeakable artifacts—chairs upholstered with human skin, soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a “mammary vest” flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in this and other human-skin garments and pretending he was his own mother.
The discovery of these Gothic horrors sent shock waves throughout Eisenhower-era America. In Wisconsin itself, Gein quickly entered local folklore. Within weeks of his arrest, macabre Jokes called “Geiners” became a statewide craze. The country as a whole learned about Gein in December 1957, when both Life and Time magazines ran features on his “house of horrors.”
After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. He was found guilty but insane and institutionalized for the rest of his life, dying of cancer in 1984.
By then, however, Gein had already achieved pop immortality, thanks to horror writer Robert Bloch, who had the inspired idea of creating a fictional character based on Gein—a deranged mama’s boy named Norman Bates. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock transformed Bloch’s pulp chiller, Psycho, into a cinematic masterpiece. Insofar as Psycho initiated the craze for “slasher” movies, Gein is revered by horror buffs as the “Grandfather of Gore,” the prototype of every knife-, axe-, and cleaver-wielding maniac who has stalked America’s movie screens for the past thirty years.
Ed Gein, Superstar
Ed Gein’s ghoulish crimes have served as the inspiration for the three most terrifying films of the past thirty years: Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.
Though Robert Bloch, the original author of Psycho, insisted that his book was not simply a fictionalized version of Gein’s crimes, his immortal character, Norman Bates, was clearly inspired by Gein. (Indeed, in Bloch’s original novel, Norman himself points out the parallels between his own crimes and Gein’s.)
Ed Gein; from True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright
(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)
Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, reportedly heard stories about Gein from Midwestern relatives and grew up haunted by these tales. In his splatter-movie classic, the Gein-inspired character is not a mild-mannered motel keeper with a split personality but a bestial hulk named Leatherface, who sports a mask made of dried human flesh.
Thomas Harris researched the FBI’s files on Gein before creating his fictional serial killer Jame Gumb (aka “Buffalo Bill”), a transsexual wannabe who attempts to fashion a suit from the flayed torsos of his victims. Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning movie version relied on Harold Schechter’s book Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original “Psycho” to create the squalid look of Gumb’s Gein-inspired house.
Psycho, Chainsaw, and Silence all take considerable liberties with the Gein story. The film that sticks closest to the facts is a 1974 low-budget shocker called Deranged, which has developed a major cult following among horror buffs. Some video versions of Deranged are prefaced by a brief documentary on Gein called A Nice Quiet Man, which includes the only known footage of some of his hideous human-flesh artifacts.
GRAVE ROBBING
See Necrophilia.
“Every man to his own taste. Mine is for corpses.”
HENRI BLOT
GROUPIES
Fame can be a powerful aphrodisiac—even when a person is famous for committing serial murder. Celebrity killers have attracted groupies for at least a century. During a ten-day span in 1895, a handsome San Francisco medical student and Sunday school teacher named Theo Durrant—the Ted Bundy of his day—lured two young women into an empty church, then murdered them and raped their corpses, leaving one body inside the church library, the other in the belfry. Durrant’s trial was a nationwide sensation, exerting a morbid fascination on people from coast to coast. A young woman named Rosalind Bowers, however, carried her fascination to what most observers felt was an unseemly extreme. Virtually every day of the trial, the dainty Miss Bowers appeared in court with a bouquet of sweet pea flowers, which she presented to the “Demon of the Belfry” as a gesture of support. Before long, Miss Bowers had gained a measure of celebrity herself, being dubbed by the papers the “Sweet Pea Girl.”
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 10