During the height of the “Whitechapel Horrors,” the London police were inundated with letters purporting to be from the shadowy killer. Almost all of these were hoaxes, but one was signed with a sinister pseudonym that would quickly become the most infamous name in criminal history:
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. . . . I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. . . . My knife is nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Ninety years later, the New York City psycho who, until that time, had been known as the “.44-Caliber Killer” received a new and permanent nickname when he left a ranting letter at a crime scene. Addressed to a Queens police captain, the letter began:
I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon 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.
Behind the house some rest. Mostly young—raped and slaughtered—their blood drained—just bones now. . . .
I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else—programmed to kill.
In August 1969, another serial assassin who murdered with a gun—the California killer known only as Zodiac—mailed letters to three Bay Area newspapers. Part of each letter was written in code. When these passages were deciphered, they formed one chilling message: “I like to kill people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because Man is the most dangerous animal of all. . . . The best part will be when I die. I will be reborn in Paradise, and then all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.” The following month, Zodiac sent another letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, threatening to “wipe out a school bus full of children”—a threat which, thankfully, he never carried out.
“Zodiac” letter
The tradition has continued in recent years in the case of Wichita’s BTK Strangler. During a murder spree in the late 1970s, this Midwestern psycho-killer fired off a series of letters that followed the usual pattern. The culprit used the correspondence to supply his own sinister nickname (an acronym based on his sadistic MO: Bind, Torture, Kill), as well as to generate media attention. And like a sulky child, he grew petulant when his tactics didn’t work. When a newspaper failed to respond quickly enough to one of his letters, he wrote back and demanded: “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?”
In one way, though, BTK was different from his predecessors. As with Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac killer, his murders came to an abrupt halt. Unlike those earlier psychos, however, BTK suddenly piped up again years later in 2004 with a whole new stream of correspondence. The reason? Perhaps he was starving for recognition again. After all, the Green River Killer had just been captured and was garnering nationwide attention. It’s possible that BTK was feeling neglected.
Or maybe he just wanted to get caught. That would explain why one of his new packages contained a computer disk which could be traced to the machine that had housed it—a clue that helped police arrest Dennis Rader, who was quickly charged with the stranglings that had happened nearly thirty years before.
“I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater, I am not. But i am a monster. I am the ‘son of Sam.’ I am a little brat.”
DAVID BERKOWITZ
The Sickest Letter Ever Written?
Undoubtedly the most ghastly letter ever written by a serial murderer is the one that cannibalistic child killer Albert Fish mailed to the mother of his twelve-year-old victim Grace Budd. Fortunately, Mrs. Budd was functionally illiterate and so was spared the horror of reading this unspeakable document. The original of this letter is now part of the collection of artist Joe Coleman:
My dear Mrs. Budd,
In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind of was from $1-3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or a girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go to any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or a girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them—tortured them—to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except head—bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E. 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3—1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How did she kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.
Albert Fish in custody (New York Daily News)
LIPSTICK
As a general rule, serial killers are not eager to get caught. Their atrocities are a source of unspeakable pleasure, and—as psychopathic personalities—they are immune to guilt or remorse.
Every so often, however, a serial murderer comes along who does feel bad about his behavior. He may even make an effort to stop. At one point, for example, Jeffrey Dahmer—who fantasized about having a zombielike sex object under his total control—stole a department store dummy in the hope that the mannequin might serve as a substitute for a human victim. Unfortunately (if predictably), the tactic didn’t work. Psychos like Dahmer are in the grip of an irresistible compulsion and find it impossible to kick the murder habit on their own. Sometimes, they will resort to suicide (see Death Wish). On other, rare occasions—knowing that they are powerless to prevent themselves from committing future horrors—they will beg for someone else to intervene.
The most famous instance of this latter phenomenon occurred in the case of William Heirens. Raised by sexually repressive parents who filled him with the belief that “all sex is dirty,” Heirens grew up to be a fetishist who achieved sexual cli
max from breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear. Intellectually gifted, he won admission to the University of Chicago in 1945 at the tender age of sixteen. Even while leading a stereotypical collegiate existence—dating, hanging out with buddies, cutting classes—he continued to pursue his clandestine life as a cat burglar and panty fetishist.
On June 5, 1945, a forty-three-year-old Chicago woman, Josephine Ross, surprised an intruder who was looting her bedroom. She was found that afternoon, sprawled across her bed, her throat slashed, her dress wrapped around her head.
Six months later, on December 10, the naked corpse of a petite, thirty-three-year-old brunette named Frances Brown was found in the bathroom of her Chicago apartment not far from the scene of the earlier crime. She had been shot in the head, a butcher knife protruded from her neck, and her housecoat was draped over her head. Scrawled in lipstick on the living room wall was a cry for help that would become the single most famous serial-killer message of the century: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”
The “Lipstick Killer” (as he was instantly dubbed by the press) committed his last—and most heinous—crime in early January, when he abducted six-year-old Suzanne Degnan from her bedroom, strangled her, dismembered her body with a hunting knife, and dumped the pieces into the sewer.
Heirens was captured the following June, after the largest manhunt in Chicago’s history. Drugged with sodium pentothal—“truth serum”—he initially claimed that the killings had been committed by an evil alter ego named “George Murman,” short for “Murder Man” (see Multiple Personality). To avoid the chair, he agreed to confess to all three slayings in exchange for life in prison. On the day of his formal sentencing, he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet but was saved by a quick-acting guard. Since the day he entered prison, Heirens—who has recanted his confession and stoutly maintains his innocence—has been a model prisoner, earning a college degree in 1972.
(Fritz Lang’s 1956 thriller, While the City Sleeps, features a teenaged “Lipstick Killer” modeled on Heirens and played by a young John Drew Barrymore, future father of the actress Drew Barrymore.)
Of course, not all lipsticked messages left by serial killers have been desperate pleas for help. Richard Ramirez—the “Night Stalker,” who terrorized Los Angeles in 1985—used a victim’s lipstick to inscribe an inverted pentagram on the inside of her thigh: a further desecration of her body and a vicious taunt to his pursuers.
Unlike Heirens, Ramirez wasn’t crying out to heaven but invoking the devil.
LOVERS’ LANE MANIACS
Driving home from the movies one Saturday night, a high school boy and his date pulled into their favorite lovers’ lane to do some necking. The boy turned on the radio for a little mood music. Suddenly, an announcer came on to say that a crazed killer with a hook in place of his right hand had escaped from the local insane asylum. The girl became scared and begged the boy to take her home. He got angry, stepped on the gas, and roared off. When they reached her house, the boy got out of the car and went around to the passenger side to let her out. There, hanging from the door handle, was a bloody hook!
So goes the story of the “Hookman”—a homicidal maniac who preys on adolescents as they make out inside a parked car. Teenagers—who have been telling some version of this story for at least forty years—often accept it as the gospel truth. Folklore scholars, on the other hand, see it as an “urban legend” that reflects the anxieties of adolescent boys and girls who are just confronting the tricky issues of grown-up sexuality. While the folklorists make a valuable point, there may be more reality to the story than they realize. The fact is that the terrifying figure of a lovers’ lane maniac is not purely a figment of the teenage imagination.
World War II had barely ended when the tiny southwestern town of Texarkana found itself under siege from a night-prowling gunman whose favorite targets were young, unwary lovers. In early March 1946, this masked maniac snuck up on a couple, ordered them out of the car, then—after pistol whipping the young man—subjected the girl to such vicious sexual torture that she begged to be killed. Precisely three weeks later, he struck again, this time shooting both young victims in the back of their heads. Following another three-week hiatus, the “Moonlight Murderer”—as the press dubbed him—killed yet another pair of sweethearts as they returned from a dance at the VFW hall. A massive manhunt was launched, involving local sheriffs, Texas Rangers, and homicide detectives disguised as teenage lovers. But the phantom gunman was never caught.
Equally elusive was the diabolical gunman known as Zodiac, whose victims included several young couples killed on deserted country roads. A third notorious couple killer, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, was eventually apprehended—but not before he had shot more than a dozen victims as they sat in their cars on the darkened streets of New York City.
Teen Terror Legends
Young people love to give each other the chills with supposedly true stories about psychokillers. Though “The Hookman” is the most famous of these urban folktales, it’s only one of many. Another is “The Boyfriend’s Death,” a story that the teller invariably swears is absolutely, positively true, since she heard it from an unimpeachable source, such as the next-door neighbor of her best friend’s cousin. Typically, the story deals with a teenage couple whose car runs out of fuel one night as they are driving through some remote wooded area. The boy decides to hike into town for gas, telling the girl to make sure to keep the car doors locked, since there is a psycho on the loose. Huddling alone in the car, the girl waits anxiously for her boyfriend’s return. But as the night passes, there is no sign of him. After a while, she hears a strange, scratching noise on the car roof. The next morning, a police cruiser arrives. As the girl is helped out of the car, she looks up and sees her boyfriend’s butchered corpse, swinging upside-down from a tree branch, his fingernails scraping the roof!
A similar folktale, “The Roommate’s Death,” tells of two young women sharing a suite in a college dorm. Hearing that there is a serial killer at large, they lock themselves into their separate bedrooms. That night, one of the girls hears someone scratching ominously on the connecting door between the two bedrooms. In the morning, she musters up the courage to open the door—and discovers her murdered roommate, her throat cut from ear to ear. The scratching sound had been the victim’s dying effort to get help.
Other teen folktales about psychokillers include “The Assailant in the Backseat”—about unwary women who discover that they have been driving along with a homicidal maniac hiding in the car—and “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” which tells of a baby-sitter who gets menacing calls from a homicidal stranger, only to discover that the calls are coming from the upstairs telephone.
Anyone who hasn’t heard these stories firsthand may have encountered them in another form, since many of them have been recast as low-budget horror movies like Halloween, When a Stranger Calls, and Friday the 13th. They have also been retold by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand in his popular collections of urban legends, beginning with The Vanishing Hitchhiker.
Henry Lee Lucas
Portrait of Henry Lee Lucas by Chris Pelletiere
Henry Lee Lucas might be America’s most prolific serial killer. On the other hand, he might be the biggest liar since Baron von Münchhausen. After experiencing a self-described “religious conversion” in prison, he decided to bare his soul and confess to an astronomical number of murders. Later, however, he recanted most of his testimony. Among law enforcement officials, the exact number of his crimes remains a matter of debate. Still, even if Lucas’s final body count falls far short of the five hundred victims he originally claimed, he nevertheless ranks as one of the most depraved serial killers in history.
Subjected to untold horrors by his insanely abusive mother (see Upbringing), Lucas began indulging in sadistic depravity while still a child. By thirteen, he was engaging in sex with his older half-brother, who also
introduced Henry to the joys of bestiality and Animal Torture. (One of their favorite activities was slitting the throats of small animals, then sexually violating the corpses.)
One year later, he committed his first murder, strangling a seventeen-year-old girl who resisted his efforts to rape her. In 1954, the eighteen-year-old Lucas received a six-year prison sentence for burglary. Soon after his release in 1959, he got into a drunken argument with his seventy-four-year-old mother and stabbed her to death. (He also confessed to raping her corpse, though he later retracted that detail.)
Receiving a forty-year sentence for second-degree murder, Lucas ended up in a state psychiatric facility. In spite of his own protestations—“When they put me out on parole, I said I’m not ready to go. I told them all, the warden, the psychologist, everybody, that I was going to kill”—he was released after only ten years. Eighteen months later he was back in prison for molesting two teenage girls.
Lucas was discharged from the state pen in 1975. Not long afterward, he met Ottis Toole, a vicious psychopath who became Lucas’s partner in one of the most appalling killing sprees in the annals of American crime. For the next seven years, this deranged duo roamed the country, murdering and mutilating an untold number of victims. Like Lucas, the profoundly depraved Toole also had a taste for Necrophilia. He also indulged in occasional Cannibalism (an atrocity that Lucas tended to shun, since he found human flesh too gamy). For much of their odyssey, they were accompanied by Toole’s preadolescent niece, Frieda “Becky” Powell, who became Lucas’s lover, common-law wife, and—ultimately—victim.
Lucas was picked up on a weapons charge in 1983. A few days later, after apparently being stricken by an uncharacteristic attack of bad conscience, he summoned his jailer. “I done some pretty bad things,” he muttered. With that, he began spilling his guts, admitting to a staggering number of murders. Some of these have been confirmed, others have proven false, many remain open cases. According to certain investigators, Lucas may have killed as many as sixty-nine victims; others put the number at eighty-one or possibly even higher. At his 1985 trial, he was convicted of ten homicides—more than enough to get him the death sentence.
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 16