by Ray Black
THE IMPALER EMERGES
Vlad’s propensity for impaling his enemies on stakes in the ground and leaving them to bleed to death earned him the nickname Tepes meaning ‘impaler’ in Romanian. This would become his calling card; a horse would be attached to each of the victim’s legs and a sharpened stake was gradually inserted into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that it should not be too sharp in case it caused the victim die too quickly of shock. Usually, the stake went up through the buttocks, often up to the mouth. In case this got boring, he sometimes used other orifices, or impaled his victims upside down. Infants might be impaled on the stake forced through their mothers’ chests. In 1459 he had 30,000 merchants and boyars of Brasov impaled: when one boyar held his nose to alleviate the terrible smell of the clotting blood and emptied bowels, Vlad solved his problem by having him impaled on a stake higher than all the rest so that he might be above the smell.
The stakes were often arranged in geometric patterns, particularly in concentric rings in the outskirts of a city he was targeting. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The decaying corpses were often left in place for months. In 1461, Sultan Mehmet II returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of 20,000 impaled Turkish prisoners outside Tirgoviste: this became known as the ‘Forest of the Impaled’. A year later Vlad carried out a daring raid by crossing the Danube on horseback into Mehmet’s camp, where he and his army had assembled to attack Wallachia. Vlad killed several thousand Turkish soldiers and caused the rest to retreat.
There is no denying that impalement was very much Vlad’s favourite form of torture, but he did deploy others; along with impalement, he enjoyed cutting off limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning victims alive, cutting off noses and ears, scalping, skinning and exposing people to the elements or to wild animals. One story goes that Vlad was visited by two ambassadors who refused to remove their hats in his presence; in this instance Vlad recognized the importance of their headwear and nailed them to their heads so that they should never have to remove them again. The mutilation of sexual organs, particularly women’s, was another proclivity. He was concerned with female chastity and exacted terrible punishment on female transgressors; one such victim was, rather hypocritically, Vlad’s own mistress. She loved him to distraction and always wanted to please him. When Vlad was moody, she tried to lighten his load and on one occasion tried to cheer him up by telling him she was pregnant. Vlad asked the bath matrons to examine her and when they proved that she was lying, Vlad drew his knife and cut her open from the groin to the breast, leaving her to die in agony.
He attacked women and children, lords and peasants, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants. His savage penalties against thieves meant that there was little stealing in his domains. He tested this by putting a golden cup on display in the central square of Tirgoviste which remained throughout his entire reign.
LEGEND OF THE ESCAPE
Vlad was eventually defeated and killed in battle near Bucharest in 1476 after attempting to regain his seat as the leader of Wallachia once more. His head was sent to Constantinople where it was displayed on a stake to prove that the cruel prince was dead. His body was buried at Snagov, an island monastery near Bucharest, to which he had donated a lot of money in memory of his father and brother. According to Eastern European legends, however, the body and head that were presented were not those of Vlad and he still walks the dark streets of Transylvania to this day.
PART SIX: CHILDREN OF EVIL
Bryan and David Freeman
Irked by the ascetic code of their parents’ religion, two skinhead siblings from Pennsylvania slaughtered their faithful family in what was the ultimate act of rebellion.
FILIAL FRICTION
Sixty miles north-east of Philadelphia on the outskirts of Allentown, Dennis and Brenda Freeman led a devout existence. Their distinctive chocolate-coloured house in the tranquil community of Salisbury Township was also home to their three sons whom they raised according to their deep religious beliefs. Belonging to the evangelical Christian denomination known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Dennis and Brenda had no problem instructing their youngest son Erik in the ways of their church, but with his elder two brothers they met considerable resistance.
Brian Freeman along with David, his younger brother by two years, had always fought against the family’s devotion to this often strict religious doctrine. Its austere code forbade the celebration of birthdays and national holidays. Followers declined to bear arms and considered drunken behaviour, smoking and drug abuse as inherently sinful. Rebelling against these beliefs any chance they could find, the two brothers became a true test of their parents’ faith.
As the brothers reached adolescence, they quickly developed into large, imposing figures. Bryan grew to six foot and weighed 215 pounds while David stood three inches taller and tipped the scales at close to 250 pounds. The pair refused to conform, smoking in the driveway, rolling home drunk late at night, dressed in long black coats and army boots, far from the modest attire considered fit for a Jehovah’s Witness. Yet their insubordinate behaviour was about to get much worse.
A NEW FAMILY
At some point in 1991 both brothers stopped attending church services. Their father then resigned from his position as an elder and concentrated his efforts on rehabilitating his sons. His endeavours failed spectacularly and after a series of violent incidents at school, Brenda decided to take action. The soft-spoken housewife contacted rehab facilities for her sons in an attempt to bring them into line but by the following year both Bryan and David showed no signs of improvement.
David soon developed a drug habit and spent time inside a hospital where doctors evaluated his state of mind. While the psychiatric report found him of above average intelligence, he was also diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder and was recommended to attend a care home for juvenile delinquents. Meanwhile, his older brother was receiving help for his own substance abuse at a therapy centre and had struck up a friendship with a fellow resident.
His new friend introduced him to the world of white supremacy. Persuaded to become a skinhead, Bryan began to decorate his room with Swastika symbols and posters of Hitler. On his release he returned home and immediately convinced his younger brother to join his Neo-Nazi family. Together with Nelson ‘Benny’ Birdwell III, their eighteen-year-old cousin, the brothers started attending Hitler Youth festivals prevalent around Pennsylvania, shaving their heads and tattooing their bodies. Immersing themselves in the barbaric subculture, it seemed Bryan and David had found themselves a new family to which they felt a real affinity.
FOREHEADS FOREWARN
This bond gave the brothers an identity which only served to fuel their anger and escalate the rebellion. The pair became more and more threatening, bragging in school about their exploits, including cutting off the head of a cat and worshipping its decapitated corpse. As the arguments inside the Freeman house intensified verbal assaults turned physical. They once tried to smother their mother with a pillow and, after a separate altercation, even pinned her to the floor whilst wielding a hatchet.
Following these attacks, Brenda sought help from the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai Brith who suggested she contact a local anti-prejudice organization. When she did so, they informed her they had no legal grounds to remove her children. It was at this time that Dennis began to keep a baseball bat next to the bed as protection from his own two sons.
On 4 February 1995, in an attempt to discipline her unruly children, Brenda sold her sons’ cars. Refusing to surrender to their parents’ will, Bryan and David retaliated the following day by tattooing their foreheads with neo-Nazi slogans. With ‘Sieg Heil’ and ‘Beserker’ inked just above their eyebrows the pair of brutes looked even more menacing. Yet fearing only God, Dennis and Brenda continued to lay down the law, stripping their bedroom walls and confiscating their offensive paraphernalia. It was after this seizure that the brothers began to
speak openly about killing their parents.
EVIL ON EHRETS LANE
February 1995 was ending in typical fashion for the Freemans. Tension between the religious and the rebellious mounted in the house on Ehrets Lane, made worse by Bryan’s recent five-day suspension for verbally assaulting his school principal. Now, late on Sunday 26 February, Bryan, David and cousin Benny sneaked in through a basement window, having violated an imposed curfew. Hearing the noise below, Brenda marched downstairs and ordered her nephew to go home and her children to go to bed.
When the three skinheads refused to comply, Brenda locked horns with her eldest and a slanging match ensued. Bryan then grabbed a steak knife and stabbed his mother in the back. Pulling the five-inch blade from the wound, she came at her son, whereupon Bryan stole back the knife and stabbed her again, this time up to the hilt. He then stuffed a pair of shorts into her mouth to muffle her screams. Soon there was silence.
They knew then they had to finish off the rest of the family. As Brenda’s lifeless body bled out on the basement floor, Ben and David moved upstairs wielding a pick axe handle and aluminium baseball bat. Visiting the master bedroom first, they bludgeoned David Freeman to death, slitting his throat before moving on to Erik whose skull they cracked so hard his eye popped out of his head. Dropping the murder weapons and lifting $200 in cash from their dead father’s wallet, the brothers quickly changed clothes and fled the scene in the family’s Pontiac Sunbird convertible.
CATCH OF THE DAY
Valerie Freeman, Brenda’s sister, was the first to find the dead. Puzzled why Dennis’ truck was still on the driveway, she had entered the house via a side door to discover it was bitterly cold and eerily quiet inside. On seeing the bludgeoned bodies upstairs, she ran to a neighbour and alerted the police. Subsequent autopsy reports revealed the true brutality of the attacks. Both Dennis and Erik had been beaten so savagely their brains had come through their skulls. Brenda had also been struck about the head but had died of her stab wounds, one had gone through her lung and pierced her heart.
Detectives focused on the remaining members of the Freeman family. Due to their belligerent reputation and known affiliation with a white supremacist movement, Bryan and David became instant prime suspects. A tip from a truck driver alerted police as to their whereabouts: the Truck World Motor Inn in Hubbard, Ohio just over the border. Here investigators traced calls made from their motel room to a residence in Hope, Michigan.
The three Musketeers, as they had long been known, had fled over 600 miles to the home of one Frank Hesse, another skinhead whom Bryan had met at a concert in Detroit. Keeping quiet about their triple homicide, the threesome joined their host ice fishing. Returning to the house later that evening the fascist fishermen found themselves surrounded by a Michigan SWAT team and were swiftly apprehended.
EVIL EXTRADITED
All four were taken into custody though Frank Hesse was soon released insisting he had no knowledge of the crimes. Meanwhile the remaining neo-Nazis had devised a plan. Believing they would be tried as juveniles, the Freemans chose to take the wrap for all three murders to save their eighteen-year-old cousin from receiving a death sentence. On 6 March, the same day their parents and little brother were buried in an Allentown cemetery, the brothers began their confessions.
Waiving their right to counsel, Bryan and David gave their versions of what happened that dark night at home. Conflicting stories helped cloud the truth but all three boys were ultimately charged before a Michigan judge and their extradition to Pennsylvania approved. Back in their home state, individual appeals for their cases to be heard before a juvenile court were withdrawn and, according to state law, both brothers stood trial as adults.
On 7 December 1995, Bryan Freeman brought a hushed silence to the courtroom. Before the judge and jury, the seventeen-year-old skinhead testified to murdering his mother. This unprompted admission of guilt was part of a deal ensuring he avoided the death penalty. David soon followed suit, pleading guilty to the slaying of his father. Each received a life sentence without possibility of parole. In April 1996, Ben Birdwell was found similarly guilty of his part in the death of Dennis Freeman and was given the same punishment. Despite all three being found criminally culpable nobody was ever convicted of killing eleven-year-old Erik.
Edmund Kemper
As a fifteen-year-old this mild-mannered man mountain gunned down his grandparents before embarking on a murder spree of California, acquiring the nickname The Coed Killer after slaying six students in under a year.
KEMPER KILLED THE CAT
Edmund Emil Kemper III was born in Burbank, California on 8 December 1948. Bookended by two sisters, he grew up the middle child in a family home filled with tension until the age of nine when his parents divorced. Despite living in such a strained atmosphere he was inconsolable at their separation. On moving to Montana with his mother and sisters, life deteriorated for the sad son. Subjected to ritual beatings and habitual humiliation by his mother, young Edmund began to seethe. Forced to sleep in a locked basement, in the dark corners of his mind and the pit of his stomach a violent rage began to boil.
His first living victim was the house cat, burying the pet alive before digging it up, cutting off its head with a machete, and sticking it on the end of a stick. His sisters would find Edmund acting out bizarre sexual scenarios with their dolls and even asked his siblings to help stage his own mock execution where he played a death row inmate in the gas chamber. The fledgling sociopath began to harbour fantasies of killing and mutilating those around him, how-ever these desires he kept hidden behind a benign public façade.
By the age of fourteen, life in Helena, Montana had grown so unbearable he chose to run away and seek out his father in California. When he arrived in the Golden State in the summer of 1963, the teen found his father was not as keen to see him; Edmund Kemper II had remarried and was now raising a new son. Feeling rejected and unloved by both parents, the unwanted visitor was then palmed off into the care of his paternal grandparents who lived on a seventeen-acre ranch in the North Fork mountains of California.
KEMPER TANTRUM
Life on the ranch was every bit as bad as living with his belittling mother. Maude Kemper consistently made Edmund feel small and worthless, and soon the rage began to rise up inside the big, friendly giant. On 27 August 1964 yet another argument broke out between grandmother and grandson. The fifteen-year-old felt the urge to react with more than words on this occasion, grabbed a .22 calibre rifle, placed it to the head of the sixty-six-year-old woman and pulled the trigger. He then unloaded two more rounds at close-range into her lifeless body then went at the corpse with a kitchen knife.
Built like an outhouse, Kemper dragged his dead grandma to the bedroom with ease. Any further acts against her person were interrupted when his grandfather returned home from the grocery store. The rookie killer made a quick decision to kill the old man too, purely to save him from finding his murdered wife. Aiming the rifle – a Christmas gift from his grandad – out of the window, he shot his relative dead, then hid his body in the garage.
Alone in the ranch-house, he called his mother to tell her what he had done. She advised him to contact the police. When the authorities arrived, they found the huge frame of Edmund Kemper calmly waiting on the porch. During the interview process, detectives asked him why he had committed the crime. He just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma, came the cold reply.
CLEVER BUT CRAZY
Kemper was detained in Juvenile Hall while a series of psychological tests ascertained his mental state. A diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia saw him transferred to Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane that December. For the next five years he underwent treatment for his condition while also learning how to appear sane. His high IQ of 136 allowed him to memorize twenty-eight separate assessment techniques that would enable him to fake his behaviour and fool his doctors.
Remaining under the supervision of the California Youth Authority,
Kemper gained his release in 1969. The powers that be placed him back into his mother’s care, ignoring his doctors’ recommendations. Edmund was now back in the lion’s den and soon mother and son were at each other’s throats once again, constantly bickering inside the Ord Drive duplex.
To begin with, the ’rehabilitated’ Edmund showed signs of normality. He attended a community college, performing well in all areas, and worked a series of menial jobs until landing a post at the Highways Division of the Department of Public Works. Endeavouring to become an ordinary and upstanding member of society, he fostered hopes of joining the police academy but was informed he was too tall. As a poor substitute he started to hang out in the jury room and listen to officers’ tales of law and order. He soon became known as Big Ed to the cops; a big, friendly giant with a softly spoken voice. But they had no idea what Edmund Kemper was plotting inside that clever yet crazy mind.
SANTA CRUZ-ING FOR GIRLS
Despite managing to save enough money to relocate to an apartment of his own, away from his abusive mother, Kemper was unable to escape his dark thoughts of violence. Soon he was filling the trunk of his yellow Ford Galaxy with a kill kit consisting of plastic bags, knives, handcuffs and blankets and cruising the campuses for coed students.