For a contrast to the nomadic style of serial murder, see Homebodies.
NURSERY RHYMES
As everyone knows, little children are fascinated by violence and horror (if you want to read something really scary, check out The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales). So it’s not surprising that homicidal maniacs frequently pop up in children’s verse.
An anonymous Axe Murderer is the subject of this cheerfully grisly nursery rhyme:
Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
A different “chopper”—the one belonging to the infamous German lust murderer and cannibal, Fritz Haarmann—features in this German nursery rhyme:
Just you wait ’til it’s your time,
Haarmann will come after you,
With his chopper, oh so fine,
He’ll make mincemeat out of you.
The bloody deeds of other real-life killers have also been celebrated in nursery rhymes. Everyone, of course, knows the one about Fall River’s most notorious daughter:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie’s near contemporary, the British “Queen Poisoner,” Mary Ann Cotton (see Black Widows), was also immortalized in a kiddie rhyme:
Mary Ann Cotton
She’s dead and she’s rotten.
She lies in her bed
With her eyes wide oppen.
The English, in fact, seem to specialize in turning lurid crimes into nursery rhymes. Two of the most notorious murderers in British criminal history were the nineteenth-century miscreants Thomas Burke and William Hare. Up until 1832, British law forbade the dissection of human corpses, except for those of executed murderers. As a result, there was a serious shortage of medical school cadavers. To fill this scientific need, some physicians turned to professional body snatchers, who would plunder fresh graves and peddle the bodies. Burke and Hare added a new twist to the body-peddling business by murdering lodgers in the boardinghouse they ran, then selling the corpses to an Edinburgh surgeon named Robert Knox. Their story has been retold many times and in various forms, from street ballads to Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher” (made into a 1945 Boris Karloff movie). It also inspired this little rhyme:
Burke’s the murderer, Hare’s the thief,
And Knox the boy who buys the beef.
And, of course, there’s this whimsical couplet about the legendary “Butcher of Whitechapel”:
Jack the Ripper stole a kipper,
Hid it in his fathers slipper.
More recent British murderers have also served as the subject for children’s verse. In the mid-1950s, a physician named Buck Ruxton murdered his wife, Isabella, and a witness to the crime, his housemaid, Mary Rogerson. Then he dismembered both corpses and dumped the remains in a ravine near Moffat, Scotland. Before long, British schoolchildren were chanting this little ditty:
Red stains on the carpet, red stains on your knife.
Oh Dr. Buck Ruxton, you murdered your wife.
The nursemaid she saw you, and threatened to tell.
Oh Dr. Buck Ruxton, you killed her as well.
Today, of course, we live in less poetic times. Instead of verse, horrific crimes tend to be transformed into grisly jokes. Still, every now and then some humble versifier will compose a tribute to a serial killer. The atrocities of Edward Gein, for example, inspired not only a spate of sick riddles (see Jokes) but also these immortal lines:
There once was a man named Ed
Who wouldn’t take a woman to bed.
When he wanted to diddle,
He cut out the middle,
And hung the rest in a shed.
NURSES
It’s bad enough when a law student (like Ted Bundy) or a policeman (like G. J. Schaefer, the Florida “Sex Beast” linked to twenty sadistic murders) turns out to be a serial killer. It seems even worse when the psycho is affiliated with the healing arts—someone who has pledged his or her professional life to the care of other human beings. Deadly Doctors fall into this category. So do lethal nurses—those homicidal health-care workers who prey on the sick and the helpless, administering not succor and comfort but suffering and death.
In Cincinnati during the 1930s, a German immigrant named Anna Marie Hahn made a reputation for herself as a kindly, devout nurse, an angel of mercy who looked after sickly old men—all of whom happened to have very healthy bank accounts. In one way or another, Hahn managed to get her hands on their money, either by asking for “loans,” getting herself written into their wills, or stealing it outright. Then she dispatched her patients with a dose of lethal medication. Over five years, she poisoned at least eleven of the trusting old souls. She became the first woman ever electrocuted in Ohio.
While Hahn was in it strictly for the money, other lethal nurses have been motivated by even darker impulses. The notorious turn-of-the-century multi-murderer Jane Toppan declared that her deepest desire was to become the most prolific killer of her day. Though Toppan was accused of eleven murders, she claimed to have committed thirty-one, and some crime buffs believe that the real total was closer to one hundred. If so, then Toppan certainly achieved her ambition.
Much more recently, in the late 1980s, a sociopathic nursing-home aide named Gwendolyn Graham and her lesbian lover, Catherine Wood, devised a demented game. They decided to smother six elderly patients, selecting victims whose last initials, when strung together, spelled out the word murder. As it happened, the “game” became too complicated to complete, but Graham and Wood kept killing old people anyway, largely because it provided the two depraved lovers with such a powerful sexual thrill.
Not all lethal nurses are women. Richard Angelo—Long Island’s “Angel of Death”—had perhaps the weirdest rationale of all for multiple medical murder. Obsessed with the need to be recognized as a hero, the one-time Eagle Scout and volunteer fireman got his degree as a registered nurse, then went to work in the intensive-care unit of Good Samaritan Hospital, where (aptly enough) he worked the graveyard shift. Before long, postoperative patients began dropping like flies. Eventually, the authorities discovered the cause of the mysterious deaths. Between mid-September and late October 1987, Angelo had injected an average of two patients per week with Pavulon and Anectine, drugs that induced paralysis and heart failure. His reason? So that he could rush to their rescue and prove that he was a hero. Unfortunately, his plan had its flaws: out of the nearly forty patients he injected, at least ten—perhaps as many as twenty-five—died.
Beginning in 1987, another malevolent male nurse, Charles Cullen, embarked on a killing spree that would outdo Richard Angelo’s. Working in nursing homes and hospitals throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Cullen dispatched as many as forty people by injecting them with various medications, such as the heart drug digoxin. When arrested in 2003, he insisted that he was simply helping to put old, terminally ill patients out of their misery—a claim seriously undercut by the fact that his victims included a twenty-one-year-old college student recovering nicely after surgery.
Dubbed “the worst serial killer in New Jersey history,” Cullen avoided the death penalty by agreeing to help prosecutors identify his victims. At his sentencing hearing in March 2006, he was denounced as “Satan’s son.” “Maybe some days he actually believes he was an angel of mercy,” said the daughter of one of his elderly victims. “Let us correct that. He is a demon from the lowest depths of hell.” He was sentenced to eleven consecutive life terms.
ORCHARDS
Back in the early 1800s (according to legend) a wandering folk hero named Johnny Appleseed roamed across the land, turning empty fields into fertile orchards. Of course, fertility isn’t the only quality connected with apple orchards. Ever since the days of Adam and Eve, the apple tree has also symbolized sin and corruption. In real life as in myth, orchards have been associate
d with both goodness and crime—not only with the delicious fruits of God’s earth but also with the deadly fruits of man’s evil.
In the spring of 1873, the citizens of Labette County, Kansas, were concerned about the alarming number of travelers who had vanished while passing through the region. A posse investigating the recently abandoned farmstead of a family named Bender noticed something peculiar about the apple orchard behind the house. Depressions in the soil between the blossoming seedlings were rectangular in shape—and approximately the size of human graves. By the time the posse finished digging up the orchard, they had uncovered the bodies of a dozen people. Most of them were men, their skulls crushed with a sledgehammer. One was a baby girl who had been buried alive with her father’s corpse. As it turned out, the “Bloody Benders” had been preying on unwary travelers for years, having turned their ramshackle farmhouse into a kind of hotel-from-hell where overnight guests rarely survived to see the light of day (see Clans).
An apple orchard also featured prominently in the most sensational crime of the 1920s, the Hall-Mills murder case. On a September morning in 1922, a young couple out for a stroll in New Brunswick, New Jersey, stumbled upon two corpses, male and female, lying side by side in a crabapple orchard. The woman’s throat had been slashed so ferociously that she was nearly decapitated. She had also been shot three times in the face at point-blank range. Though the dead man had not been subjected to the same mutilations, he had been killed with chilling deliberation—executed with a single bullet to the brain. What made the murders especially lurid was the identity of the victims: the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, pastor of New Brunswick’s most fashionable Episcopal church, and his choir-girl mistress, Mrs. Eleanor Mills. The subsequent trial of the reverend’s betrayed wife and her two eccentric brothers was the O. J. Simpson affair of its day—a frenzied, three-ring media circus followed with prurient fascination by the whole country. (As in the O.J. case, the defendants were acquitted and the case remains officially unsolved.)
The orchard where the bodies had been found turned into a major tourist attraction, where vendors hawked soft drinks and popcorn to the curious hordes, who stripped every leaf and crabapple from the branches as morbid souvenirs.
Fifty years later, orchards of another kind—the peach orchards surrounding Yuba City, California—became the site of one of the most gruesome discoveries in American criminal history. In May 1971 a farmer discovered a hacked-up corpse buried between two fruit trees. Other discoveries in nearby orchards soon followed. One by one, the corpses of migrant workers and male transients were unearthed until the body count reached a staggering twenty-five. All of the victims had been savagely slashed with a knife and a machete, and a number of them bore the signs of sexual assault. Evidence eventually led police to someone very familiar with the orchards of Yuba City, a farm labor contractor named Juan Corona, whose conviction on twenty-five counts of murder in 1973 marked him as the nation’s most prolific serial killer. Unfortunately for America, that record has since been eclipsed several times.
ORGANIZED/DISORGANIZED
See Profiling.
OVENS
Few fairy tales are more chilling to children than “Hänsel and Gretel”—the story of a cannibal witch who plans to feast on two fattened children but ends up incinerated in her own oven. Perhaps that’s what adds a special dimension of horror to serial killers who use ovens to dispose of their victims. The whole situation seems like something from a childhood horror story—a real-life, exceedingly grim fairy tale.
Henri Landru, the “Bluebeard of Paris,” even looked like a fairy-tale villain, with his bald head, bristling brows, and spiky red beard. In spite of his unprepossessing appearance, however, he became infamous as one of the world’s leading lady-killers, marrying and murdering no fewer than ten women (see Bluebeards). Believing (incorrectly) that without a corpse, the authorities could not convict him of murder, he reduced all his victims to ash in an outdoor oven. Even without a single identifiable body, however, the authorities were able to assemble enough circumstantial evidence to send Landru to the guillotine.
Dr. H. H. Holmes—the turn-of-the-century serial killer and another notorious lady-killer—disposed of dozens of victims in the same way. When investigators finally broke into his rambling “Horror Castle” in a suburb of Chicago, they discovered both a basement crematorium and an oversized office stove that still contained the charred remnants of one of his ill-fated mistresses. Holmes’s most heinous crimes, however, were the cold-blooded murders of three young siblings—the children of his accomplice, Ben Pitezel. Two of these little ones were asphyxiated and buried in a basement crawl space. The blackened remains of the third, a ten-year-old boy, were found in the belly of a coal-burning oven.
Perhaps the most appalling of Holmes’s many crimes was the murder of two young girls, Alice and Nellie Pitezel, who were gassed to death inside a steamer trunk—an atrocity portrayed in this nineteenth-century book illustration
Of course, disposing of victims isn’t the only use to which ovens have been put by deranged psychokillers. When German police arrested the cannibalistic sex killer Joachim Kroll in 1976, they found something cooking on his stove: the chopped-off hand of a four-year-old girl, simmering in a saucepan with sliced potatoes and carrots.
Carl Panzram
During his final prison stretch in the late 1920s, Carl Panzram confessed to twenty-one murders, countless felonies, and more than one thousand acts of sodomy. “For all these things,” he declared, “I am not the least bit sorry.” It was a typical statement by one of the most incorrigible criminals in American history. Some sociologists have blamed Panzram’s vicious nature on the penal system, which subjected him to countless brutalities in an effort to break his spirit, but only filled him with a hatred for all humankind. Others have a different explanation: that he was simply born bad.
Whether Panzram’s badness was acquired or innate is a matter of debate. One thing is certain: his criminal career started early. His first conviction was for drunk and disorderly conduct—when he was eight years old. Three years later, a string of burglaries landed him in reform school. During his time there, he torched one of the buildings, causing an estimated $100,000 worth of damage. The thirteen-year-old Panzram was released from the institution in 1904 with knowledge that would last him a lifetime—“how to steal, lie, hate, burn, and kill” (as he would write in his autobiography).
Portrait of Carl Panzram by Joe Coleman
Paroled to his mother’s custody, he promptly ran away to lead the life of a hobo. While hitching a ride in a boxcar, he was gang-raped by four “burly bums,” who taught him another lesson he would continue to live by: “Force and might make right.”
He joined the army at sixteen, but military discipline was not Panzram’s long suit. He was court-martialed and sentenced to three years in Leavenworth. Following his release, he embarked on a career of spectacular brutality. Traveling around the world—to South America, Europe, Africa, and finally back to the United States—he left a trail of corpses in his wake.
In the 1920s, Panzram committed two of his most infamous crimes. With the proceeds from an especially profitable heist, he purchased a yacht and lured ten sailors aboard with the promise of free bootleg liquor. After the sailors drank themselves into a stupor, Panzram raped them, shot each one in the head, then dumped their bodies in the ocean.
Later, after shipping out as a merchant seaman to West Africa, he hired eight native bearers, presumably to help him hunt crocodiles. Panzram ended up killing and raping the Africans, then feeding their corpses to the crocs.
By 1928, Panzram was back in America, where he was arrested for a series of burglaries in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. Sentenced to twenty years in Leavenworth, he announced that he would “kill the first man that bothers me.” He made good on his threat the following year, smashing in the skull of a laundry foreman. It was this crime that finally got Panzram a long-overdue death sentence. He was hanged on Septembe
r 5, 1930. Consistent to the end, he went to his death with a curse on his lips. “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard,” he snarled as the executioner prepared the noose. “I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around!”
For a flawed but intriguing film about Panzram, check out Killer (1996), with the always watchable (if somewhat miscast) James Woods in the title role.
“I sat down to think things over a bit. While I was sitting there, a little kid about eleven or twelve years old came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it, too. I took him out to a gravel pit about one-quarter mile away. I left him there, but first committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him, and he will never be any deader.”
CARL PANZRAM
PARAPHILIA
Paraphilia—which literally means “abnormal love”—is the technical term for sexual deviation or perversion. It need hardly be said that when it comes to paraphiliac behavior, serial killers are as sick as they come.
The average foot fetishist, for example, might assemble a sizable collection of stolen spike-heeled shoes. By contrast, at least one serial killer gratified his fetish by cutting off the feet of his victims and storing them in his refrigerator. Clipping and saving tufts of female pubic hair is another common fetish. Serial killers, on the other hand, are just as likely to remove the entire vulvas of their victims.
Painting of Albert Fish flagellating himself with a nail-studded board; art by Michael Rose
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 20