by Colin Wilson
In 1988, Ressler conducted a conference at Quantico, an International Homicide Symposium, in which both Kemper and Gacy agreed to appear on live-circuit television from their prison cells, and be interviewed by Ressler. Kemper was as frank as always, speaking in detail about his crimes and his motivations. Gacy, on the other hand, used his 90 minutes to insist on his innocence, and to try to persuade the watching law-enforcement officials to probe further into the case and uncover evidence that would lead to his release. Some of the audience later criticised Ressler for not ‘pinning Gacy to the wall’ and forcing him to face up to his guilt. Ressler’s reply was that this would have served no real purpose, since his aim was to allow the audience to see the mind of a serial killer at work, and to see Gacy’s conviction of his innocence—in flat contraction to the facts—and his skill as a manipulator, one of the more frightening skills of many serial killers.
But how do we explain Gacy’s refusal to accept responsibility for the murders? Was he, as he claimed, a Jekyll and Hyde who was periodically taken over by the person he called ‘Bad Jack’? Ressler thinks not. In such killers, he argues, ‘the deadly side is always there, but the murderer is frequently successful in hiding it from the outside world’.
My own conviction is that the key lies in Gacy’s childhood. From a fairly early age it was clear that he had psychiatric problems, and that they linked to his father. John Stanley Gacy was a violent bully and an alcoholic. He was also a Right Man. ‘If my father said the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow you couldn’t disagree with him. He’d argue you into the ground.’ His father was, it followed naturally, a violent man who beat the child regularly with a razor strop, and never lost an opportunity to tell the boy he was ‘dumb and stupid’. His father detested him for being sickly and weak, and not interested in ‘manly sports’. When the child was 11 he was struck on the head with a swing, and thereafter began to suffer from blackouts. Gacy senior said he was play-acting.
Certainly the number of sex killers who have suffered head injuries is so high that it is hard to deny the probable correlation. The following lists only some of the most prominent.
The ‘French Ripper’ Joseph Vacher, a tramp who raped and disembowelled victims of both sexes in the mid-1890s, had attempted to shoot himself through the head, permanently damaging one eye and paralysing the right side of his face. It is not known what part of the brain he damaged, but after years in an asylum he was released and began his career of sex murder, killing 11 before he was caught and executed in 1898.
Fritz Haarmann, Hanover, Germany’s ‘cannibal killer’, suffered from a concussion after a fall from parallel bars during his army training in 1900; after a period in the hospital he was judged mentally deficient. After World War One, working as an unofficial police agent, he made a habit of picking up destitute youths at the railway station and taking them to his room. The murders were not apparently pre-planned; sexual frenzy would carry him away, and Haarmann would either strangle his victims, or suffocate them by fixing his teeth in their windpipes. He cut up the bodies and sold them for meat. Haarmann was executed in 1925.
America’s ‘Gorilla Murderer’ of the 1920s, Earle Nelson, was knocked down by a streetcar when he was ten years old (in 1902). The fall gashed a hole in his temple, rendering him unconscious for six days, after which he suffered from recurring pain in the head and dizziness. After several periods in an asylum he escaped and began to roam the country, committing 22 sex murders between February 1926 and his capture in June 1927. He was hanged in January 1928.
Child-killer Albert Fish, who was born in 1870, began to suffer from severe headaches and dizzy spells, and also developed a stutter, after a fall from a cherry tree as a child. He committed his first murder—of a homosexual—in 1910, but had been raping small boys since 1895. He mutilated and tortured to death a mentally retarded boy in 1919, and between that time and his capture in December 1934 is believed to have committed 15 more murders of children, one of whom (Grace Budd) he cooked and ate. He himself claimed to have committed 400 murders.
Raymond Fernandez was perfectly normal until a falling hatch knocked him unconscious when he was at sea in December 1945. At 31 years of age, Fernandez suddenly turned into a sex maniac, contacting lonely women through advertisements in contact magazines, and seducing them—it made no difference whether they were young or old, fat or thin, beautiful or ugly; he even seduced one seriously disabled woman. He and his mistress Martha Beck became known as the ‘Lonely Hearts Killers’ after murdering a number of women for their money, and were executed in 1951.
John Christie, the British sex killer of the 1940s and early 1950s, had been knocked down by a car when he first came to London, and was unconscious for several hours.
Richard Speck, who systematically killed eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on one July day in 1966, had suffered a number of head injuries as a child, but began having severe headaches and blackouts at the age of 16 after a policeman had broken up a fight by beating him on the head several times with his club. Speck died in prison in 1991.
Gary Heidnik was tried in 1988 for keeping six black women prisoner in his basement in Philadelphia and subjecting them to a four-month ordeal of rape and torture, during which he killed two of them, cooking parts of one of the corpses and feeding it to the other prisoners. Heidnik had been mentally abnormal since he fell out of a tree as a child, deforming the shape of his head so that his schoolfellows called him ‘football head’.
Randy Kraft, a computer expert of Long Beach, California, was stopped on 14 May 1983 for careless driving and was found to have the corpse of a young man propped up beside him in the passenger seat. A search of the car and his home revealed that he was the homosexual ‘Freeway Killer’ who had been murdering and torturing young men since 1975 and dumping their bodies on the freeways. A list found in his car indicated that he had killed 67 men. As a child, Kraft had fallen down a flight of concrete steps and been unconscious for several hours. He was sentenced to death in 1989.
Henry Lee Lucas (see Chapter Eleven) was violently beaten by his drunken mother as a child, and on one occasion was unconscious for three days after she struck him on the head with a piece of wood
Bobby Jo Long, received a fractured skull after a motorcycle accident when in the army, and remained in a coma for weeks. After this, he reported, he began thinking about sex all the time. From having sex with his wife two or three times a week he went to two or three times a day, also masturbating in between. He began committing rapes after he left the army, telephoning women who had placed classified advertisements and, if he found them alone, raping them. Then, in 1983, he changed suddenly from a non-violent rapist to a sex murderer, killing nine women in the Tampa, Florida, area. After each murder he sank into a deep sleep, and when he woke up was never certain whether he had dreamed it all—he had to go out and buy a newspaper to find out. Finally, he was touched by the story of a 17-year-old girl who had been abused in childhood, and although he raped her, he let her go, knowing that it would lead to his arrest.
Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis examined Long and found that he had had more than one head injury—one after falling off a swing, one after being knocked down by a car. A PET scan showed that he had damage to the left temporal lobe, and an abnormality of the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with violence. She was inclined to believe that this was responsible for Long’s hyperactive sex drive. In spite of these discoveries, Long was sentenced to death.
The British serial killer Fred West (see Chapter Sixteen) had two serious injuries to his head, the first a motorcycle crash that left him unconscious for a week, the second when a girl pushed him off a fire escape after he put his hand up her skirt—this time he was unconscious for two days.
At the time I write these words, Dennis Rader, the ‘BTK’ killer (bind, torture, rape), sought by the police for over thirty years, has explained in an interview that he was dropped on his head as a child.
All this should make
us aware that we should not dismiss the view that Gacy’s accident with the swing may explain a great deal that seems baffling about his crimes. He was interviewed in prison by the psychologist Dr Helen Morrison, who appeared for the defence to support his plea of insanity, and her account of him in her book My Life Among Serial Killers makes it obvious that by no stretch of the imagination could Gacy be described as sane. She notes that he would contradict himself, from sentence to sentence, and that he could change from reasonable behaviour to rage and violence in a moment. Although Dr Morrison was appearing in his defence, he could swing instantly from friendliness to fury, and shout that she was dumb and stupid. Gacy was a seething cauldron of violent emotions, only held together by his overwhelmingly high opinion of himself. Her prison interviews with him read like conversations with someone who is firmly convinced that he is Julius Caesar and is married to the Queen of Sheba. It is not surprising that, after his conviction, he suddenly started declaring that he had never killed anybody, but had been framed by the police. It is also certain that, if he had taken a lie detector test, it would have registered that he was telling the truth.
When Gacy was asked by a friend of mine, Jeffrey Smalldon, what he thought of my entry on him in An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, he replied predictably: ‘Colin Wilson doesn’t understand me.’
On 10 May 1994, he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois. A crowd cheered as he was pronounced dead.
It later emerged that his execution had gone badly; the ingredients of the lethal injection had been mixed in a way that caused them to solidify, so he took a long time to die. There were even rumours that his execution had been deliberately bungled to prolong his discomfort.
The demonstrations at Gacy’s execution were reminiscent of the final scenes of another notorious serial killer of the 1970s, Ted Bundy, who also happens to be another textbook case of the ‘high-IQ killer’.
On 31 January 1974, a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Lynda Ann Healy, vanished from her room; the bloodstained bed sheets suggested that she had been struck violently on the head. During the following March, April and May, three other female students vanished; in June, two more. In July, two young women vanished on the same day. It happened at a popular picnic spot, Lake Sammamish; a number of people witnessed a good-looking young man, with his arm in a sling, approach Janice Ott and ask her to help him lift a boat onto the roof of his car; she walked away with him and did not return. Later, Denise Naslund was accosted by the same young man; she also vanished. He had been heard to introduce himself as ‘Ted’.
In October 1974, the killings shifted to Salt Lake City; three young women disappeared in one month. That November, the police had their first break in the case: Carol DaRonch was accosted in a shopping centre by a young man who identified himself as a detective, and informed her that there had been an attempt to break into her car. She agreed to accompany him to headquarters to view a suspect. In the car he snapped a handcuff on her wrist and pointed a gun at her head; she fought and screamed, and managed to jump out of the car. That same evening, a female student vanished on her way to meet her brother. A handcuff key was found near the place from which she had been taken.
Meanwhile, the Seattle police had fixed on a young man named Ted Bundy as a main suspect. For the past six years, he had been involved in a close relationship with divorcee Meg Anders, but she had called off their engagement when she realised that he was a habitual thief. After the Lake Sammamish disappearances, she had seen a composite drawing of the wanted ‘Ted’ in the Seattle Times and thought it looked like Bundy; moreover, ‘Ted’ drove a Volkswagen like Bundy’s. She had seen crutches and plaster of paris in Bundy’s room, and the coincidence seemed too great; with many misgivings, she telephoned the police. They assured her that they had already checked out Bundy; but at the suggestion of the Seattle police, Carol DaRonch was shown Bundy’s photograph. She tentatively identified it as resembling the man who had tried to abduct her, but was obviously far from sure. (Bundy had been sporting a beard at the time.)
In January, March, April, July and August of 1975, more young women vanished in Colorado, and their bodies—or skeletons—were found in remote spots. On 16 August 1975, Bundy was arrested for the first time. As a police car was driving along a dark street in Salt Lake City, a parked Volkswagen launched into sudden motion. Curious at its haste, the policeman followed, and it accelerated. He caught up with the car at a service station, and found inside the car a pantyhose mask, a crowbar, an ice pick, and various other tools; there was also a pair of handcuffs.
Bundy, 29, seemed an unlikely burglar. He was a graduate of the University of Washington, and was in Utah to study law; he had worked as a political campaigner and for the crime commission in Seattle. In his room there was nothing suspicious—except maps and brochures of Colorado, from which five young women had vanished that year. But strands of hair were found in the car, and they proved to be identical with those of Melissa Smith, daughter of the Midvale police chief, who had vanished the previous October.
Carol DaRonch had meanwhile identified Bundy in a police line-up as the fake policeman, and bloodstains on her clothes—where she had scratched her assailant—were of Bundy’s blood type. Credit card receipts showed that Bundy had been close to various places from which young women had vanished in Colorado.
In theory, this should have been the end of the case—and if it had been, it would have been regarded as a typical triumph of scientific detection, beginning with the composite drawing and concluding with the hair and blood evidence. The evidence was, admittedly, circumstantial, but taken all together, it formed a powerful case.
The central objection to it became apparent as soon as Bundy walked into court. He looked so obviously decent and clean-cut that most people felt that there must be some mistake. He was polite, well-spoken, articulate, charming, the kind of man who could have found himself a girlfriend for each night of the week. Why should such a man be a sex killer? In spite of which, the impression he made was of brilliance and plausibility rather than innocence. For example, he insisted that he had driven away from the police car because he was smoking marijuana, and that he had thrown the joint out of the window.
The case seemed to be balanced on a knife-edge—nevertheless, the judge pronounced a sentence of guilty of kidnapping. Bundy sobbed and pleaded not to be sent to prison; the judge ignored his whimpering and imposed a sentence of between one and fifteen years jail time.
The Colorado authorities now charged him with the murder of Caryn Campbell, who had been abducted from a ski resort where a witness had seen Bundy. After a morning courtroom session in Aspen, Bundy succeeded in wandering into the library during the lunch recess, and jumping out of the window. He was recaptured eight days later, tired and hungry, and driving a stolen car.
Legal arguments dragged on for another six months: what evidence was admissible and what was not? And on 30 December 1977, Bundy escaped again, using a hacksaw blade to cut through an imperfectly welded steel plate above the light fixture in his cell. He made his way to Chicago, then south to Florida; there, near the Florida State University in Tallahassee, he took a room. A few days later, a man broke into a nearby sorority house and attacked four young women with a club, knocking them unconscious; one was strangled with her pantyhose and raped; another died on her way to the hospital. One of the strangled girl’s nipples had been almost bitten off, and she had a bite mark on her left buttock. An hour and a half later, a student woke up in another sorority house when she heard banging next door, and a girl whimpering. She dialled the number of the room, and as the telephone rang, someone could be heard running out. Cheryl Thomas was found lying in bed, her skull fractured but still alive.
Bundy would later confess that he had again been watching girls undress outside the sorority house when he was overwhelmed by the impulse to break in and commit rape.
Three weeks later, on 6 February 1978, Bundy—who was cal
ling himself Chris Hagen—stole a white Dodge van and left Tallahassee; he rented a room at the Holiday Inn, using a stolen credit card. The following day, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach walked out of her classroom in Lake City, Florida, and vanished. Bundy returned to Tallahassee to take a date out for an expensive meal—paid for with a stolen credit card—then absconded via the fire escape, owing large arrears of rent. At 4 a.m. on 15 February a police patrolman noticed an orange Volkswagen driving suspiciously slowly, and radioed for a check on its number; it proved to be stolen from Tallahassee. After a struggle and a chase, during which he tried to kill the policeman, Bundy was captured yet again. When the police learned his real name, and that he had just left a town in which five young women had been attacked, they suddenly understood the importance of their capture.
Bundy seemed glad to be in custody, and began to unburden himself. He explained that ‘his problem’ had begun when he had seen a girl on a bicycle in Seattle, and ‘had to have her’. He had followed her, but she escaped. ‘Sometimes,’ he admitted, ‘I feel like a vampire.’
On 7 April a party of searchers along the Suwanee River found the body of Kimberly Leach in an abandoned hut; she had been strangled and sexually violated. Three weeks later, surrounded by hefty guards, Bundy allowed impressions of his teeth to be taken, for comparison with the marks on the buttocks of the dead student, Lisa Levy.
Bundy’s lawyers persuaded him to enter into plea bargaining: in exchange for a guarantee of life imprisonment—rather than a death sentence—he would confess to the murders of Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, and Kimberley Leach. But Bundy changed his mind at the last moment and decided to sack his lawyers.