The difficulty of winning an NGRI verdict is vividly illustrated by the case of Albert Fish, certainly one of the most bizarre minds in the annals of American crime. A frighteningly sadistic child killer and cannibal, Fish was a true psychiatric phenomenon, who indulged (according to expert testimony) “in every known sexual perversion and some perversions never heard of before.” Though the jury agreed that Fish was suffering from severe mental derangement, they found him guilty and sentenced him to the chair. As one juror explained after the trial (expressing a sentiment that many people would endorse), “we believed he was insane, but we thought he deserved to die anyway.”
INTERNET
In just a few years the Internet has evolved from an online grab bag of highly dubious information to a legitimate, even indispensable, research tool (though there’s still a lot of highly dubious information floating around).
The single best Web site for serial killer biographies—as well as for highly informative articles on subjects like “Team Killers” and “Necrophilia”—is Court TV’s Crime Library (www.crimelibrary.com). Serial Killer Central (www.skcentral.com) offers up-to-the-minute news, along with a host of psycho-related material, including serial-killer art, poetry, and short stores. The Internet Crime Archives (www.mayhem.net) is another rich, if slightly headache-inducing, source of information, some of it relating to obscure murderers ignored by other media outlets.
Google the name of any notorious serial killer and you are sure to come up with a sizable number of hits. Psychos who tend to generate the most obsessive interest in the public often have entire Web sites built around them. One of the best of these is Tom Voigt’s Zodiac page (www.zodiackiller.com). There is also—as one would expect—a very impressive site devoted exclusively to the most legendary serial killer of all, Jack the Ripper (www.casebook.org).
If the Internet has become a very useful tool for people interested in serial killers, there’s some indication that it may also prove to be a resource for serial killers themselves. There have already been two known cases of psychos who trolled for victims in cyberspace: the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who found a sacrificial volunteer by posting an ad on the Web, and online predator John E. Robinson, responsible for at least seven homicides.
An Eagle Scout at thirteen and an aspiring priest, Robinson dropped out of seminary prep school and embarked on a career as a con artist, forger, and embezzler. His scams took a murderous turn in 1985, when he killed a young unwed mother and sold her four-month-old baby to his own brother and sister-in-law, who believed they were receiving a legally adopted child.
In the meantime, Robinson was also running a prostitution ring specializing in sadomasochistic sex, an activity that brought him to the attention of the FBI and eventually landed him in jail. Released in 1993, he quickly discovered the Internet and—under the name “Slavemaster”—began participating in sexually explicit chatrooms. With his con-man wiles, it didn’t take him long to snare a series of submissive women who traveled to meet him and ended up rotting in sealed barrels.
Robinson’s increasingly reckless behavior brought him under police surveillance, and he was finally arrested in 2000 at the age of fifty-six. A search of some desolate property he owned in Kansas, as well as of a rented storage facility across the state line in Missouri, turned up five large chemical drums, each containing the decomposed corpse of a woman.
In January 2003, “the first Internet serial killer,” as he was dubbed in the press, was sentenced to death.
IQ
Though no real-life psychopath comes close to matching the evil genius of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, serial killers tend to be smart. When special agents of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit began their criminal Profiling program, they discovered that the mean IQ for serial killers was bright normal.
The above-average intelligence of these psychopaths is one of the scariest things about them, making it possible for them not only to snare victims with relative ease but also to elude the police, sometimes forever (see Whereabouts Unknown). It also accounts for the striking number of serial killers who have done well in terms of worldly success. Ted Bundy was a law student, John Wayne Gacy ran a thriving business, Gary Heidnik made a fortune playing the stock market, and a considerable number of serial killers have been Doctors.
On the other hand, it’s also true that because of their severe personality problems, many serial killers end up working at menial jobs that are far beneath their intellectual capacities.
Jack the Ripper
The horrors began in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888. At roughly 3:45 A.M., while walking down a deserted, dimly lit street in London’s East End, a market porter named George Cross stumbled upon what he took to be a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. Peering closer, he saw that the sprawling heap was the butchered body of a woman, later identified as a forty-two-year-old prostitute named Mary Anne Nicholls. Her throat had been slashed, her belly slit, her vagina mutilated with stab wounds.
Though no one could have suspected it at the time, the savaging of Mary Anne Nicholls was a grisly landmark in the history of crime. Not only was it the first in a string of killings that would send shock waves throughout London and, eventually, the world, but it also signified something even more momentous—the dawn of the modern age of serial sex murder.
A week after the Nicholls atrocity, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted forty-seven-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house a half mile from the site of the first murder. Chapman’s head was barely attached to her body—the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spinal column. She had also been disembowelled.
The true identity of the killer would never be known. But several weeks later, the Metropolitan Police received a taunting Letter by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known by this grisly nickname—Jack the Ripper.
Two days after police received the Ripper’s letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Before he could commit any further atrocities on the victim, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching wagon. Hurrying away, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a forty-three-year-old prostitute who had just been released from a police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found lying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into a deserted square, where he slit her throat. Then, in the grip of a demoniacal frenzy, he disfigured her face, split her body from rectum to breastbone, removed her entrails, and carried off her left kidney.
“The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body. . . . The nose had been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the thighs, down to the feet, stripped of the flesh. . . . The entrails and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed by the murderer on the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach.”
From an 1888 newspaper description of Jack the Ripper’s final victim, Mary Kelly
The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. On the evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her rooms. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse—disembowelling her, slicing off her nose and breasts, carving the flesh from her legs.
Following this outrage, the Whitechapel horrors came to an abrupt end. The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history into the realm of myth.
Since then, armchair detectives have proposed a host
of suspects, from a kosher butcher to an heir apparent to the English throne (see Ripper Theories). Most of these “solutions” make for colorful reading, but the Ripper’s true identity remains what it has been for a hundred years—a tantalizing, probably insoluble mystery.
Ripper Theories
There is a basic (and disheartening) law of police work: if a case isn’t cracked right away, then the odds of ever solving it rapidly shrink to zero. So the chances of coming up with the solution to a hundred-year-old crime are essentially less than nil. Still, that hasn’t stopped a host of armchair detectives from offering up theories on the most tantalizing murder mystery of all: Who was the knife-wielding serial prostitute killer known as Jack the Ripper? For the most part, these theorists are harmless cranks, like the people who spend their time trying to prove that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, or that Amelia Earhart ended up in a Japanese nunnery. The most likely truth is that—like virtually every other serial killer in history—the Ripper was a complete nonentity whose only remarkable trait was a staggering capacity for violence. But—as is so often the case with reality—that simple explanation is infinitely less satisfying than more colorful alternatives. Following are some of the more entertaining hypotheses put forth by various “Ripperologists”:
1. The Mad Russian. Supposedly Rasputin himself wrote a book called Great Russian Criminals in which he claimed that Jack the Ripper was actually a deranged Russian doctor named Pedachenko, who was dispatched to London by the tsarist police in an effort to create consternation in England and embarrass the British authorities.
2. The Black Magician. The Ripper was actually Dr. Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson, a self-styled conjurer obsessed with the occult, who supposedly committed the East End murders as part of a satanic ritual.
3. The Jewish Slaughterman. A shochet, or kosher butcher, decided to use his carving skills on women of the night.
4. Jill the Ripper. The homicidal maniac was not a man at all but a demented London midwife.
5. The Lodger. An unnamed boarder in a London roominghouse acted suspiciously at the time of the Ripper murders and might have been the East End fiend. Although the vaguest of the Ripper solutions, this theory has distinguished itself as the basis for four entertaining movies, including an early Hitchcock thriller (see Le Cinéma de Jack).
6. The Deadly Doctor. A man named Dr. Stanley committed the murders as an act of revenge, after his son contracted syphilis from a prostitute.
7. The Lethal Lawyer. A failed attorney named Montague John Druitt committed the Ripper crimes, then drowned himself in the Thames.
8. The Polish Poisoner. A multiple murderer named Severin Klosowski (aka George Chapman), who poisoned three of his wives, presumably committed the Whitechapel slayings out of his pathological hatred of womankind in general.
9. The Evil Aristocrat. HRH Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence—Queen Victoria’s grandson and heir to the British throne—went on a killing spree after he was maddened by syphilis.
10.The Crazed Cotton Merchant A diary that surfaced in the early 1990s “revealed” that the Ripper was a drug-addicted businessman named James Maybrick. Unfortunately, the diary was declared a hoax by renowned document experts.
11. The Psycho Painter. Patricia Cornwell, the popular crime novelist with a flair for forensic science, spent six million dollars of her own money to prove that Victorian painter Walter Sickert was the real Ripper. Cornwell’s theory—set forth in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed—rests partly on Sickert’s penchant for dark, sexually disturbing subject matter and partly on some highly dubious DNA testing that indicated that Sickert could have been one of thousands of people who wrote a Ripper letter that might very well have been a hoax.
Despite the crowing subtitle of Cornwell’s book, most serious Ripperologists scoff at her theory. One reviewer (Caleb Carr, author of the bestselling historical thriller The Alienist) went so far as to demand that Cornwell issue a public apology for slandering Sickert’s reputation.
Le Cinéma de Jack
It’s not surprising that Jack the Ripper—the most famous of all serial killers—has been a longtime favorite of filmmakers. Following is a list of his most memorable big-screen appearances:
1. Pandora’s Box (1928). Classic silent film by G. W. Pabst, starring screen legend Louise Brooks as the femme fatale Lulu, who ends up as a streetwalker in London. And guess who her very first (and last) customer is?
2. The Lodger (1944). Based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, this suspense thriller—about a family named Bunting who suspect that their new boarder is Jack the Ripper—had already been filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1926. But Hitchcock’s version is like Hamlet without the prince, since it turns out that the Buntings are wrong. The 1944 version, directed by German émigré John Brahm, is more faithful to the original—Saucy Jack really is living in the Bunting house and taking a lively (or deadly) interest in their young daughter, Daisy.
3. Room to Let (1950). Adapted from a BBC radio play of the same title, this modest little thriller (in which Jack turns out to be a sinister physician named Dr. Fell) was an early production of the fledgling Hammer Film Company, beloved by horror buffs for the lurid fright films it began turning out in the late 1950s.
4. Man in the Attic (1954). Still another version of The Lodger, this one starring the inimitable Jack Palance as the Ripper. Talk about typecasting.
5. Jack the Ripper (1960). A low-budget British shocker with a memorable gimmick. Though the entire film is in black and white, the climactic sequence—in which Jack is crushed to death by a falling elevator—was shot in color so the audience could enjoy the vivid red of his gushing blood.
6. A Study in Terror (1965). What a concept! Sherlock Holmes battles Jack the Ripper in this brisk, entertaining thriller, produced with the cooperation of Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Holmes’s creator.
7. Hands of the Ripper (1971). Suffering from the traumatic aftereffects of watching Daddy stab Mommy, Jack the Ripper’s angelic daughter turns into a homicidal maniac whenever a guy kisses her. She ends up in treatment with an early disciple of Freud. A Hammer movie classic!
8. Murder by Decree (1979). Another Holmes vs. Ripper movie, this one with a stellar cast: Christopher Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland, Genevieve Bujold, David Hemmings, John Gielgud, and Anthony Quayle.
9. Time After Time (1979). Nifty little fantasy written and directed by Nicholas Meyer in which Jack the Ripper travels from Victorian England to modern-day America via H. G. Wells’s time machine.
10. Jack the Ripper (1988). Originally a two-part TV movie, this is a solid, lavish telling of the Ripper case, starring Michael Caine as a Scotland Yard inspector hot on the trail of Saucy Jack. It sticks to the facts except for its conclusion, when the hero succeeds in unmasking the killer.
11. From Hell (2001). Though it could have benefited from a bit more terror and suspense—not to mention the sort of grisly violence one hopes for in a Jack the Ripper movie—this handsome adaptation of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s acclaimed graphic novel does an impressive job of conjuring up the sordid underbelly of Victorian London. Johnny Depp gives a typically compelling performance as the opium-using Scotland Yard sleuth who uncovers a high-level conspiracy in his pursuit of Saucy Jack.
JEKYLL/HYDE
Plenty of people lead double lives: suburban matrons with lovers on the side; happily married hubbies who sneak off at night to cruise the gay bars; successful corporate executives supporting costly heroin habits. But cases like these pale beside the lives of certain serial killers. Ted Bundy was so bright and personable that he could have run for elected office if he hadn’t also been a sadistic sex killer who murdered dozens of young women. John Wayne Gacy liked to dress up as a clown and entertain hospitalized children when he wasn’t torturing teenage boys in his suburban home. And the Swedish physician Dr. Teet Haerm, who mutilated and killed at least nine young women, was a respected forensic pathologi
st who actually ended up performing the autopsies on some of his victims.
Killers like these possess such monstrously split personalities that they seem slightly unreal, as if they stepped from the pages of a horror story. More specifically, they seem like the flesh-and-blood incarnations of a figure first dreamed up by British writer Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1880s: Dr. Henry Jekyll, who spends half his life as an idealistic scientist and the other half as a hideous creature named Edward Hyde.
“Dreamed up” is not just a figure of speech, since the idea for the story reportedly came to Stevenson in a nightmare. He dashed off a first draft in just three days, but his wife was so shocked by this version that Stevenson burned it, then rewrote it in a slightly less sensational form. Like Dracula and Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of those stories that everyone knows, even if they’ve never read the original. This is largely because it’s been made into so many movies, beginning with a 1920 silent version starring John Barrymore. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that Stevenson’s novelette is not so much a horror story as a mystery, revolving around the question of Edward Hyde’s identity—who is this evil being and what is his relationship to the distinguished Dr. Jekyll? The answer to these questions isn’t revealed until the very end, when readers discover that Hyde is really Jekyll’s alter ego, the living embodiment of the good doctor’s bestial, hidden self.
For people who only know Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the movies there are other surprising aspects of the original story. On film, Hyde is typically portrayed as a fanged, hairy creature—a kind of werewolf in Victorian clothing. In the book, however, he is less overtly monstrous. There is something deeply repellent about him, but exactly where this quality comes from is hard to say. “He is not easy to describe,” one character remarks. “There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way.”
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 13