by Colin Wilson
During the next three months there were eight similar attacks in two villages; 28 people died, and one woman was raped. In Enerhodar, seven were killed. He returned to Bratkovychi on 17 January 1996 to kill a family of five. In Fastov, near Kiev, he murdered a family of four. In Olevsk, four women died. His usual method was to shoot the men, knife the women, and bludgeon children to death.
There was panic, and an army division was called in to patrol the villages. An intensive manhunt was mounted—even greater than for Chikatilo. Finally, in April 1996, police arrested Onoprienko near Lvov.
The 36-year-old ex-mental patient, was soon confessing to a total of 52 murders.
Born in 1959, Onoprienko began his career as a forestry student. He would confess: ‘The first time I killed I shot down a deer in the woods. I was in my early twenties, and I recall feeling very upset when I saw it dead. I couldn’t explain why I had done it, and I felt sorry about it. I never had that feeling again.’
Later he became a sailor on cruise liners. After giving up this well-paid job, he became a fireman. In 1989, he and an accomplice named Sergei Rogozin decided to commit a burglary, but were surprised by the householder, whom they then killed. Rogozin was his accomplice in eight additional murders motivated by theft.
It was during his later killing spree of 1995, he confessed, after a period in a mental hospital in Kiev when he was diagnosed schizophrenic, that he had raped a woman after shooting her in the face. During another spree, he had approached a young girl who had fallen on her knees to pray after seeing him kill her parents. He asked her to tell him where they kept the money, and she stared in his eyes and said defiantly, ‘No, I won’t.’ Onoprienko killed her by smashing her skull; but he admitted later that although he was impressed by her courage he nonetheless still felt nothing during the murders. ‘To me, killing people is like ripping up a duvet,’ he told journalist Mark Franchetti, in his tiny prison cell in Zhitomir, Ukraine, where his trial had been held.
In 1989, ‘driven by a rage at God and Satan’, he had killed a couple standing by their Lada car on a motorway. He also killed five people in a car, and then sat in the car for two hours, wondering what to do with the corpses, which quickly began to smell.
The act of killing, he insisted, gave him no pleasure. On the contrary, he felt oddly detached from it. ‘I watched all this as an animal would stare at a sheep,’ he told police in a confession videotaped in 1997. ‘I perceived it all as a kind of experiment. There can be no answer in this experiment to what you’re trying to learn.’ He said he felt like both perpetrator and spectator.
Onoprienko claimed that he was driven by some unknown force, and that voices ordered him to kill. ‘I’m not a maniac,’ he insisted to Franchetti, ‘I have been taken over by a higher force, something telepathic or cosmic, which drove me.’ But he had to wait for this force to give him orders. ‘For example, I wanted to kill my brother’s first wife, because I hated her. I really wanted to kill her, but I couldn’t, because I had to receive the order first. I waited for it, but it did not come.’
‘I am like a rabbit in a laboratory, a part of an experiment to prove that man is capable of murdering and learning to live with his crimes. It is to show that I can cope, that I can stand anything, forget anything.’
His trial began in Zhitomir in late November 1998. The delay was due to a lack of funds. The authorities could not afford to try him because his crimes had covered such a wide area. Eventually, after two years, his judges went on television to appeal for money, and the Ukrainian government contributed the $56, 000 for the trial.
Like Chikatilo, Onoprienko was confined in a metal cage in the courtroom. Sergei Rogozin, accused of being an accomplice in nine of the killings, stood trial with him. The trial ended four months later, on 31 March 1999, when Onoprienko was found guilty and sentenced to death. Rogozin received 13 years. Because there is a moratorium on capital punishment in Russia, Onoprienko is still alive and may never be executed. Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, however, spoke of temporarily lifting the moratorium in order to execute Onoprienko.
For his part, Onoprienko declared that he wished to die. ‘If I am not executed, I will escape and start killing again. I am being groomed to serve Satan.’ He believed that he was destined to kill a large number of people, perhaps 350, and that if his sentence is commuted to life
—which in Russia means at most 20 years—he would go on to fulfil his destiny after his release (by which time he would be 60).
The judge who sentenced him, Dmitri Lipski, said: ‘He is driven by extreme cruelty. He doesn’t care about anything—only about himself. He is egocentric, and has a very high opinion of himself.’
What motivated all of these murders?
Psychiatrists who examined Onoprienko stated that he was not insane. He was brought up without parents, and his elder brother allowed him to be taken into an orphanage. This, psychiatrists suggested, may be why he has chosen to kill whole families. His worst killing spree occurred at the time he moved in with his girlfriend and her children and it seems possible that this sight of a happy family triggered the resentment that is the key to virtually all serial killers.
Although he proposed to his girlfriend by offering her a ring he had just cut off the finger of a corpse, she insists that he was very tender and loving with the children. Here again we encounter the split personality that seems so typical of a certain type of serial killer.
I have left one of the most interesting profilers of the Behavioral Science Unit to the end. This is partly because Gregg McCrary was relatively a latecomer to the BSU, joining in 1990, but also because two of his three best known cases—the Toronto Rapist and the poet-killer Jack Unterweger—occurred outside the US, and are thus appropriate for this final chapter.
A high school teacher and wrestling coach who joined the FBI in 1969
—when he was 24—Gregg McCrary spent years working in Michigan, the Midwest, New York, and Buffalo before John Douglas recruited him for the NCAVC. But he proved to be oddly suited to the BSU because he had studied the Japanese martial art of Shorinji Kempo, which emphasises thinking past the present situation to future strategyn—excellent training for out-thinking the criminal mind. He liked what he had seen and heard of the Behavioral Science Unit, and two years before John Douglas became chief in 1990, he applied to join—one of thirty or so who were after the same job. McCrary landed it.
I became acquainted with Gregg in 1989, when a London publisher asked me to write a book about serial killers. I asked a friend who lived nearby, Donald Seaman, if he would like to collaborate with me. As an ex-reporter, the first thing he wanted to do was visit the FBI Academy at Quantico for himself. I rang there, explained I was writing a book about serial murder, and asked if I could speak to someone in the Behavioral Science Unit. A few minutes later, Agent Gregg McCrary was on the line, and when I explained what I wanted, he said that he would see what he could do to arrange it. His intervention was so effective that a few weeks later Don was in Virginia, being guided around the Academy by Gregg—to whom, in due course, we dedicated The Serial Killers. This is how Don describes Gregg in the book:
He stands some six feet in height, a spare, upright figure with a pale face, a carefully trimmed moustache, and brown hair flecked with grey. As with all personnel in the NCAVC he is smartly dressed, reflecting the evident high morale. Equally, this is the FBI at work; McCrary’s dark blue blazer reveals no sign of the Smith & Wesson 9mm semi-automatic below, fully loaded with twelve rounds in the magazine, plus one (for emergency) already in the chamber.
Gregg was kind enough to send me a copy of the useful FBI handbook Criminal Investigative Analysis (1989) by Ressler, Douglas, Anne Burgess and others. And Don passed on to me a letter from Gregg, in which he discusses my comment that there is a basic suicidal impulse in serial killers, which explains why so many of them make absurd mistakes that land them in the gas chamber. (I had pointed out that one third of all murderers commit suicide.)
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In the letter, dated October 1989, Gregg commented that, being egocentric psychopaths, most serial killers are unfortunately not the suicidal type. ‘They don’t want to deprive the rest of us of the value of their company.’ He goes on:
The exception is the sexually sadistic serial killer. His crimes involve the infliction of physical and psychological terror on his victims. He may use weapons or instruments to torture the victims before death and be involved in experimental sexual activity. He abducts his victims and keeps them for hours, days, months, etc.
While they represent a minority of serial killers, they are the most horrific due the ante-mortem activity. Examples would be Christopher Wilder, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, etc.
Most serial killers (Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, etc.) kill their victims quickly in a brutal blitz style of attack. Sexual assaults and dismemberment are post-mortem. These types of killers who do not inflict torture prior to death are far less inclined to be suicidal than are the sub group of sexually sadistic serial killers.
This is a point worth underlining. Killers such as Dean Corll and John Gacy are not remotely suicidal because they are so self-absorbed.
They remain lifelong adolescents. On the other hand, Henry Lee Lucas confessed because he was overtaken by a kind of religious conversion, and the Boston Strangler because he somehow ‘outgrew’ murder.
On the other hand, I am inclined to wonder if there is such a clear distinction between sadists and non-sadists. Lake committed suicide because he was trapped and faced life in jail. Chris Wilder, a spree killer who murdered and raped half a dozen women on a cross-country rampage in the spring of 1984, turned his gun on himself when cornered. But at least one thing is clear: sex murder is addictive, which is why most sex murders carry on until they are caught, even if, like Rolling and Onoprienko, they come to feel that they are serving some evil force.
One of McCrary’s first major cases at Quantico is a good example of obsessive addiction—in this case to a kind of necrophilia. The man who became known as the ‘Genesee River Killer’ murdered 11 women in the Rochester area of New York in the late 1980s. In trying to profile the man responsible, McCrary was struck by the evidence of one prostitute who recognised his picture as a client who had wanted her to ‘play dead’. Like Christie, this man had problems raising an erection with a conscious woman.
Noting that the murders continued even though there was panic in the red light district, McCrary deduced that the killer seemed so ordinary and non-threatening that prostitutes felt he was harmless. He probably drove a nondescript car. From behavioural evidence he was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, McCrary felt that the killer would be older than that, perhaps late twenties. He would probably work at some menial job, and might well be a fisherman, since so many victims had been found in the Genesee River Gorge, known for its good fishing.
In many of the 11 murders, there were signs that the killer had returned, probably to have sex with the body. But in the case of the last but one, he had also disembowelled his victim. It was this victim, June Stott, who proved to be the turning point in the case. It was at that point that local authorities called in the FBI—and Agent McCrary. For McCrary, the Stott murder showed that the killer was ‘growing into this___Killing wasn’t enough. He had to come back and cut her open.’
The police decided to make use of helicopters, since the gorge has so many twists and turns where a body might be dumped (it is sometimes called the Grand Canyon of the East). After much frustrating searching, a pilot spotted the body of a woman, clad only in a white shirt, half-concealed by a bridge, and above it, a man who was either urinating or masturbating. The helicopter followed the man and he drove away to the town of Spencerport, where he parked close to a nursing home. The airborne observers watched the heavily built, middle-aged man go inside. After alerting troopers on the ground, the helicopter flew off to protect the crime scene, while the troopers confronted the driver. Lacking ID, he nonetheless admitted that he was Arthur Shawcross, 44, who had once served 15 years for murdering two children.
When arrested, Shawcross at first denied his guilt. But when asked whether his mistress—who worked in the nursing home—was involved in the murders, he hung his head, and said: ‘No, I was the only one involved.’
McCrary’s profile proved remarkably accurate—the killer’s appearance, the kind of car he drove, the love of fishing in the gorge, the fact that Shawcross returned to the scenes of his crimes to masturbate. It was not murder that he found most satisfactory; that was merely a means of rendering his victims passive. Like Christie, Shawcross needed an unconscious woman.
The only inaccuracy was the killer’s age—he was 44, not 29 or 30. Then it struck McCrary that Shawcross had been in jail for 15 years, and that in a sense his development had been on hold during that time. Forty-four was therefore not a bad estimate after all.
Arthur Shawcross, who earlier in life had suffered a number of severe head accidents, one involving a blow from a sledgehammer, was sentenced to a total of 250 years in prison.
This notion of murder as an addictive drug also seems to apply to another case that McCrary profiled, the ‘Scarborough Rapist’, Paul Bernardo, whose case would have fitted perfectly into the chapter on sex slaves except that Bernardo’s three murders do not qualify him as a serial killer.
The rapes began in May 1987. The perpetrator, who was described as young and white, would follow women who alighted from buses in the Scarborough area of east Toronto, attack them from behind, and make sure that they did not see his face. Scarborough is a middle class area, and he would sometimes drag them behind bushes on the edge of lawns, or between the houses. He would call them foul names, and use more violence than was necessary—in one case he broke the victim’s shoulder bone, and smeared her hair with dirt. He would rape and sodomise them, and then force them to give him oral sex.
McCrary profiled him as a young man who lived in the area—hence his care in making sure that his victims did not see his face. He felt hatred and resentment towards women. He was probably incapable of sex unless he was inspiring fear, and he was most likely unmarried and lived at home, since as a young man he would be unable to afford his own house in Scarborough.
The rapes had reached a total of 15 when, in June 1991, 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy disappeared. Two weeks later, parts of her body, encased in concrete, were found on the edge of Lake Gibson, Saint Catherine’s. Then, in April of the following year, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Kristen French, vanished on her way home from school. A witness who had seen a cream-coloured car speeding away left the police in no doubt that she had been abducted, almost certainly by two people. Two weeks later her body was found dumped down a side road. She had been beaten and strangled.
The killer was arrested in late January 1993. It happened after DNA profiling had finally identified the Scarborough rapist. There had been 224 suspects, among these Paul Bernardo, who resembled an identikit drawing of the rapist. Bernardo had given blood, hair and saliva samples to be compared with the rapist, but had heard nothing further in two years, and assumed he was in the clear. In fact, the DNA testing had proceeded slowly, and Bernardo was among the last five suspects whose body samples were tested. It was only then that the police knew that Paul Bernardo was the Scarborough rapist they had been seeking for more than five years. The person who revealed him as the killer of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French was his wife—and accomplice in the murders—Karla.
Once again, Gregg McCrary’s profile of the rapist proved remarkably accurate. Bernardo lived in the Scarborough area, was then 23, and was living at home with his parents.
The story, as it then emerged, began when Paul Bernardo, a handsome young businessman of 23 met the 17-year-old blonde Karla Homolka in a Howard Johnson’s in 1987, and the two lost no time in climbing into bed. Later, it became clear that their affinity was based upon the fact that his sexual tastes veered towards sadism, and hers towards masochism. At 16, Karla had allowed a boyfriend to
tie her up with his belt and slap her during sex, and discovered that she enjoyed it. The first time she and Paul were alone in her bedroom, he found handcuffs in her pocket, and asked: ‘Are these for me?’ He then handcuffed her to the bed and pretended that he was raping her. As their relationship progressed, she had to dress up as a schoolgirl—with her hair in pigtails tied with ribbons—and he also liked her to wear a dog collar round her neck when they had sex. If she failed to comply with his demands, Bernardo beat her. She soon became expert at explaining away her bruises to friends.
When she met Bernardo, Karla was unaware that he was the Scarborough Rapist, whose attacks continued for years after they had met and become engaged.
Some time before Christmas 1990, Karla had asked Bernardo—by now her fiance, and living in her home—what he wanted for Christmas, and Bernardo had replied: ‘Your sister Tammy.’ Tammy was 15, and still at school. Desperate to please Bernardo, Karla obtained sedatives from the animal clinic where she worked, and on the evening of 23 December, 1990, they invited Tammy to join them in watching a film after midnight in the basement ‘den’. They plied the unsuspecting girl with drugged drinks and, when she fell unconscious, Bernardo undressed her and raped her on the floor.
It was while Bernardo was raping Tammy—filmed by Karla—that he noticed that she had stopped breathing, and her face had turned blue. The couple’s attempts to revive her failed so they re-dressed her and called an ambulance. No suspicion fell on Karla or Bernardo; the inquest ruled the death as accidental. It was assumed that she had drunk too much and choked on her own vomit.
In June 1991, a 14-year-old schoolgirl named Leslie Mahaffy arrived at her home at 2 a.m. to find herself locked out. Bernardo came across her sitting disconsolately on a bench in her backyard, and offered her a cigarette. Then he held a knife to her throat, and took her back to the house that he and Karla now shared—they were due to get married in two weeks. There he raped her and videotaped her urinating.