by Suruthi Bala
Indeed, serial killers span all racial groups; there is nothing unique about it to white men. Think about it: serial killers are active in every nation in the world, and while yes, the US does by quite a considerable measure top the charts, serial killers in a country like America are as racially diverse as the population itself. In fact, studies have shown that there is an overrepresentation of Black serial killers in the US.
In his 2005 paper “African-Americans and Serial Killing in the Media: The Myth and the Reality,” Anthony Walsh, an American criminologist and professor at Boise State University, examined 58 years of serial killing activity in the US between 1945 and 2004. In this study, Walsh found there to be 90 African American serial killers and 323 white American serial killers active within the timeframe of the study. When you compare these numbers by proportion within the population, African Americans were represented among serial killers at a rate approximately twice their average percentage in the population (which was about 10.5 percent) across the same timeframe.
Black serial killers are most certainly a thing; in fact, they disproportionately “outperform” their white counterparts in terms of their sheer numbers. (And given that studies like this are only considering known serial killers, this can only be the tip of the iceberg.) So, if the existing data shows this—and reports point it out—why then is the reality of the Black serial killer not talked about?
Why is it that these men don’t achieve the celebrity status of a Bundy and make it into those weird Etsy serial killer coloring books? Why aren’t they being played by a former High School Musical cast member in a turtleneck? Why do society and the media fall all over themselves to paint serial killers as exclusively white men? Why do we ignore Black and other minority serial killers?
The most obvious reason that jumps to mind is, of course, that since serial killers usually kill within their own race, most serial killers of color kill victims of color. Victims of color are the less-dead and therefore we don’t hear about them. But given that Heidnik and Dahmer, who both targeted victims of color, are well-known serial killers, this can’t be the whole story…
One theory out there is that media outlets limit coverage of Black serial killers and other serial killers of color because of a fear they will be accused of racism. In his paper, Walsh makes this particular claim. He suggests that the media is too scared to “cover heinous crimes committed by African Americans compared with the zealousness of its coverage of such crimes committed by whites.”
This is an interesting theory, but not one we can get on board with. Why? Well, let’s consider the media’s willingness and the ease with which they cover stories featuring minorities as petty criminals, gangbangers, or drug dealers. What about terrorism? Is it only terrorism if the assailant is a brown Muslim man with a beard? Because according to most Western media white nationalist terrorism isn’t really terrorism, and an angry white man who goes on a politically motivated rampage is often seen as a “lone wolf.”
Interestingly, white men do lead the pack when it comes to crimes like shootings, domestic terrorism, and family annihilations, and although they are consistently the most likely profile of such killers, this isn’t the narrative the media seems to present. Yet in the world of serial killing, where statistically white men aren’t that unique, we’re constantly being force fed their weird serial killing big dick energy and it’s fascinating. We theorize that possibly this is because being a terrorist or killing your family isn’t deemed quite as “romantic” as being a serial killer. Perhaps a terrorist isn’t quite as “fuckable” as a serial killer.
Think about those women who used to dress up like the 30 women Bundy raped and murdered down to the dyed, middle-parted brown hair and hoop earrings to go be his groupies at trial. And look at how people today still look at that creepy-faced weirdo and tell you he’s hot. Even Dahmer got a mess of love letters from a load of female fans, even though he definitely wasn’t buying what they were selling.
Leave alone for a minute the wackos turning up at trial in victim fancy-dress, sending in these letters and gifts and marrying locked up serial murderers. Society itself has fallen in love with serial killers; they totally dominate popular culture and entertainment today. (Look no further than us, your friendly neighborhood true crime podcasters…) Serial killers are fetishized by society as being geniuses. They outsmart everyone; they are always 10 steps ahead; they’re omnipotent, dominant, powerful. Sexy, right? Do we ignore serial killers of color because society and the media are happy to readily apply these traits to white men but not to men of color?
So now we can start to understand why the prevalent myth that serial killers are rarely Black has two detrimental effects: First, it seems to suggest that African Americans are not sufficiently psychologically complex or intelligent to commit a series of murders without being caught. Second, police tend to neglect the protection of potential victims of serial killers in African American communities.
In fact, any race-based assumptions made by law enforcement when it comes to the criminality of a certain demographic have a terrible impact on the whole of society. Now, some will say that this is all nonsense and that it’s not about racism at all. These people tend to claim that Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, et al. just got more coverage because they had so many victims and because their crimes were so brutal.
Again, we have to call bullshit on this. Just consider for a moment that the FBI have now confirmed that Samuel Little, a Black drifter killer who was caught in 2012, is now America’s most prolific serial killer ever. He is thought to have killed upwards of 90 people between 1970 and 2005, most of whom were young Black women and all of whom were sex workers. No one had a clue. Little got away with it for as long as he did not only because he was a drifter and killed randomly, but also because he went after the perfect prey. What’s really interesting is that his killing activity peaked in the 1970s, the same time that Mr. Bundy was dominating the headlines.
And Little is by no means an anomaly:
Charles Ng, from Hong Kong, abducted, raped, tortured, and killed between 11 and 25 women in Northern California in the mid-eighties.
Derrick Todd Lee, an African American man, killed at least six women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana between 1992 and 2003.
Coral Eugene Watts, an African American man, who is thought to have killed anywhere between 14 to 100 victims before finally being caught in 1982.
Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, a Mexican native, murdered at least 23 people during the nineties before turning himself in.
Rory Conde, a Colombian man, was responsible for six sex worker homicides, again in the nineties, in Miami, Florida.
We already saw with Gary Heidnik and Jeffrey Dahmer how the “right” victim selection can keep a killer going for years. During our research on these two killers, we came across the documentary Killers for Company. This film made a comparison between Heidnik and Dahmer, and while there is an obvious similarity—in that they were both white men targeting minorities in the eighties—that’s about it. Dahmer was busy killing and creating his horrific male “sex zombies” in Wisconsin, while Heidnik was spending his time pilfering money, starting a church, and murdering Black women in Philadelphia. A much better comparison would be between serial killer Harrison Graham (a.k.a. the Corpse Collector) and Gary Heidnik, as proposed by Allan Branson from the University of Leicester in his study “African American Serial Killers: Over-Represented Yet Underacknowledged.”
During the 1980s, the city of Philadelphia became the hunting ground for three killers: The Frankford Slasher—an unknown killer who starting in 1985 is suspected to have killed up to nine women over a period of five years. It was widely reported that all the victims were seen shortly before their disappearance with a middle-aged white man who was described as having “a round face, glasses, and a limp.”
Then there was of course Gary Heidnik, who we had the pleasure of meeting in his basement earlier in this chapter. Finally, there was Harrison Graham, or as he was also
known, Marty. Both Heidnik and Graham lured vulnerable, poor Black women, sometimes sex workers, to their houses where they held them captive. So the victimology is the same. And guess what? He lived just three miles down the road from Heidnik and was caught just a few months later.
But while Heidnik went on to become a pop culture muse as the inspiration for Buffalo Bill, there is not even a single book out there on Graham. Maybe you’re thinking, OK, but we just went through Heidnik’s crimes and even if he only killed two people, it was pretty shocking and sensational. Well, I’d reserve your judgment on that until you read what Harrison Graham got up to. In fact, if we go by the FBI’s definition of a serial killer—a killer who has killed three or more victims with defined cooling off periods in between—then Heidnik, who killed two women, isn’t technically even a serial killer at all. Graham, on the other hand, killed seven people(!), and yet he is barely talked about. We’re not saying let’s turn him into a superstar, too, but we do need to talk about him, and his victims, so let’s do that.
It was a scorching summer day in Philadelphia on Sunday, August 9, 1987 when the police started receiving phone calls from residents of a derelict-looking apartment building at 1631 North 19th Street. It was on a rough side of town with boarded up shops. News reports from the time suggest that it was a place of poverty, teeming with drugs, and the sound of sirens filled the air most days. The police weren’t keen to head down there, but the residents were adamant. There was an unbearable stench coming from an apartment—it smelled like death.
In his book Hunting Humans, Michael Newton touches upon Harrison Graham, and describes how when the police arrived they found that the door to the apartment had been nailed shut. This, along with the suffocating smell, immediately raised some eyebrows. Once inside, Officer Pete Scallatino found piles and piles of rubbish everywhere, half empty boxes of food, moldy magazines, and layers of human and dog feces. It was disgusting, but it wasn’t the source of the putrefying stench, so he carried on deeper into the hovel.
Officer Scallatino eventually made it to the bedroom and there on the floor were the rotting bodies of two Black women. Investigators started sifting through the mountains of trash that filled the house, looking for more bodies, and bingo. Wrapped in sheets, hidden under mattresses and in cupboards, the police found six rotting corpses in total that day. The following day they found the remains of another body that no one had noticed on the roof of the building.
Police were quickly informed that a 28-year-old man named Harrison “Marty” Graham, had been living in that apartment for four years and just that month had left after an argument with the landlord. But people were surprised—Graham was a pretty chill guy and everyone liked him. The hunt for Graham was on, but he was a man used to keeping a low profile and avoiding attention and so he proved hard to track down. Meanwhile investigators were doing their best to identify Graham’s seven victims; one of the bodies was that of Mary Jeter Mathis; 36, a local mother of five, and another body was that of Graham’s own former girlfriend, Robin DeShazor; 29.
Finally, after eight days, Graham turned himself in and confessed to the seven murders; he had called his mother to ask for help and she had persuaded her son to stop running and just come home. Graham gave a 10-page confession, in which he admitted to police that he had lured his victims to his place with offers of drugs and money in exchange for sex, and then after sex he would murder them and hide them in his apartment.
Graham only seemed to show remorse for the killing of his ex-girlfriend, Robin DeShazor, saying; “I wanted so badly to love her, but I could not stop my need to do the other things. I never liked the sex and it got so much easier when I didn’t have to see her… I didn’t want her looking at me that way and I saw God being angry through her eyes.”
In April 1988, Graham was convicted on seven counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of abusing a corpse. He was sentenced to life in prison and six death sentences.
As you can see, continuing to ignore marginalized victims is tragic, and ignoring non-white serial killers is dangerous. One of the main issues related to the lack of coverage of Black serial killers is not just that they are sidelined compared to their white counterparts, but that their very existence is erased. Under this kind of invisibility cloak, Black serial killers can hunt undetected and thereby kill already marginalized victims with impunity. As a society, we need to recalibrate our empathy gaps to make room for the less-dead.
8
SEX
Torture Trailers, Tribal Tats, and Truth or Consequences
SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX. MOST OF US SPEND AN INORDINATE amount of time, money, and effort trying to get some. And even if the whole men-think-about-sex-every-seven-seconds thing isn’t quite true, there’s no denying that sex is everywhere from toothpaste commercials to true crime. We are a society obsessed with sex.
Sex, and the pursuit of it, is one of the few things we do as a species that weaves its way into every aspect of who we are: culturally, societally, physically, spiritually, biologically, and emotionally. Some would even go so far as to say that sex is our very raison d’etre; as if we’re here to do nothing more than to just pass on our genes before we shuffle off our mortal coils. Whether or not we want to agree with that rather bleak, purely biological outlook, sex is absolutely one of our most powerful motivators as human beings. (Let’s be real—it’s the reason we pay to get our pubes ripped out by a stranger every six weeks.)
So perhaps it’s no surprise then that a 2019 study, “Sex Differences in Serial Killers,” found that 75 percent of male serial killers were motivated by sex.
In this chapter we’re going to explore what happens when sex becomes intertwined with violence, aggression, and pleasure in the mind of a killer, and how this deadly combination has produced some of the most brutal and horrific offenders imaginable. We really have saved the very worst for last, so prepare yourselves. But before we step into a horrifying world of nightmarish torture dungeons to try and understand how sexual desire drives a killer, we need to first look at how sex and arousal impact the bodies and brains of us normal non-murderers. So get set to get wet—let’s talk about sex, baby!
Your Brain on Sex
When we’re turned on or having sex, our brains go into complete overdrive. Our neural reward centers light up like a sexy Christmas tree and our brains are flooded with a powerful cocktail of tasty, tasty chemicals like vasopressin, epinephrine, oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine.
In 2003, the rather saucily titled study “Brain Activation During Human Male Ejaculation” found that during arousal and orgasm, blood flow to the cerebellum (the part of the brain that processes emotions) increases significantly, but the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (the center of logical reasoning, and the section of the brain responsible for rational decision-making) completely shuts off. So with our brain’s logic center silenced and our emotional and thrill-seeking side screaming with euphoria, it’s easy to see why we get carried away in the heat of the moment. And the huge surge of neurotransmitters like dopamine (the same chemical that gets people high when they take drugs like cocaine) explains why sex is so incredibly powerful, and even addictive.
Now obviously all this only happens when it’s sex we like, and what we like can vary massively. And although the 2019 annual Pornhub report (yes this does exist, and yes, we did look it up) showed that the most common search terms on their site were lesbian, threesome, big tits, and milf, it would appear that most of us are not quite as vanilla as all that. Because according to a 2011 study, “How Unusual Are the Contents of Paraphilias?,” a whopping 64 percent of men surveyed reported a sexual interest in at least one paraphilia.
What’s a paraphilia? We’re glad you asked. It’s defined by the American College of Psychiatrists as “any intense and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners.” Basically, someone with a paraphilia is turned
on by objects, activities, situations, and targets that are considered abnormal when connected to sex. Check out our paraphilia sidebar to discover the turn-ons you aren’t likely to see in the latest edition of Cosmo.
PARAPHILIAS YOU NEVER ASKED FOR, BUT WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO FORGET
Here are some of the most interesting paraphilias we came across:
Agalmatophilia: arousal from statues, mannequins, and immobility.
Autoplushophilia: sexual arousal caused by oneself dressed as a giant, cartoon-like stuffed animal.
Climacophilia: experiencing erotic gratification by falling down stairs.
Coprophilia: a sexual fixation with feces.
Dacryphilia: sexual arousal brought about by the sight of tears.
Infantilism: sexual arousal from acting like and being treated as a baby.
Klismaphilia: sexual gratification from enemas.
Maschalagnia: a sexual attraction to armpits.
Partialism: sexual fixation with one part of the human body, like a foot.
Plushophilia: a sexual interest in stuffed animals.
Telephone scatologica: talking dirty to a total stranger on the phone who is not expecting it.
Urophilia: a sexual fixation with urine.
As odd as some of us may find certain paraphilias, they are a very personal thing. And if you’re not hurting yourself or anyone else, why not crawl around dressed up like a baby, or whip out that mannequin leg and have at it? According to the DSM-5, a paraphilia only becomes a diagnosable paraphilic disorder when:
the person with the paraphilia feels distressed about their sexual interests (and not just because of society’s judgey-ness)