The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  It was now clear that a serial killer was at work and the authorities involved met in Austin on 30 October 1981. They decided to pool their resources but even there they could come up with no solid suspects.

  In 1983, the prolific serial killers Henry Lucas and Ottis Toole confessed to most of the I–35 murders and Lucas was convicted and sentenced to death in the “orange socks” case. But it was later demonstrated that Lucas was working as a roofer in Florida in October 1979. Work records and cheque-cashing evidence show that he could not have done it. Subsequently it has been shown that Lucas and Toole were not guilty in many of the 350 murders they confessed to. It seems that the police were merely trying to clear their books of troublesome cases. The “orange socks” case and the other I–35 returned to the “unsolved” list. Many believe that the I–35 killer is still at large.

  The I–70—“America’s Sewer Pipe”

  The I–70 has been the killing ground of so many serial killers that it has become known as “America’s Sewer Pipe”. One killer who used the stretch between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s and has never been caught became known simply as the “I–70 Killer”. The killer dumped the bodies of nine gay men within a few miles of the highway. No suspect has ever been apprehended, despite the widespread publicity the murders have generated, including their being featured several times on the television show America’s Most Wanted.

  In October 1998, authorities announced that they strongly suspected that Indianapolis businessman and serial killer Herb Baumeister could have been the I–70 Killer. Baumeister was a closet homosexual. A married man with three children, he secretly frequented gay bars in Indianapolis. In the summer, when his wife and kids were away at his mother’s lakeside condominium, he took young men back for a “cocktail and a swim” to their $1-million Westfield estate, known as Fox Hollow Farm.

  In May 1993 gay men began disappearing in Indianapolis. Ten went missing over two years, but the killer left no clues. Then in the autumn of 1994, a man told the police that he had been picked up by a man who called himself Brian Smart. They had gone to Smart’s sprawling estate and engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation. Smart was a devotee and admitted that, sometimes, there had been accidents. A year later the man spotted Brian again and, aware of the disappearances, took down his licence-plate number. The car belonged to Baumeister.

  Although the police lacked the necessary evidence to obtain a search warrant, in November 1994, they turned up at Fox Hollow Farm and ask for permission to search the grounds. When Baumeister refused, they petitioned his wife Julie. They told her that her husband cruised gay bars and that they suspected him of being a serial killer. He was a devoted husband of 20 years standing and she refused to believe them.

  “The police came to me and said, ‘We are investigating your husband in relation to homosexual homicide,’” she recalled. “I remember saying to them, ‘Can you tell me what homosexual homicide is?’”

  It was only when their 13-year-old son found parts of a skeleton in the woods that she gave her permission. Then, when her husband was away in June 1996, the police began their search. The remains of seven men were found. They had been strangled. All the victims used the same bars that Baumeister did and disappeared at times when his wife and kids were away. Meanwhile, 49-year-old Baumeister disappeared. On 3 July 1996, campers discovered his body lying beside his car in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park. He had a bullet hole in his forehead and a .357 Magnum in his hand.

  An FBI profiler said that Baumeister’s cavalier manner of openly dumping his victims’ corpses in his back yard indicated that he had killed many times before. Baumeister insinuated to a potential victim that he had killed 50 to 60 people. He was known to have travelled on the I–70 from Indiana to Ohio around the time of the highway killings, which stopped in 1990, around the time that Baumeister bought Fox Hollow Farm.

  In 1998, investigators concluded that Baumeister probably killed 16 men in all after linking him to nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio between 1980 and 1990. Baumeister’s wife provided credit card receipts, phone call records, and even gave the police the use of the car that her husband had used on those business trips.

  Baumeister’s photo matched the police sketch drawn from descriptions provided by witnesses who thought they had seen the I–70 Killer. One eyewitness identified Baumeister’s picture as the same man who had given his friend Michael Riley a lift home from a bar one evening in 1988. Riley was found dead the next morning.

  “We’ll never know for sure, of course, if he was indeed the same man,” said Virgil Vandagriff, a private investigator employed to look into the disappearance of some of the missing men. “Everything points to him—even the fact that the roadside killings ended at the same time he bought his house and now had a place with plenty of room to dump his bodies with a lot less hassle.”

  However, Vandagriff complained that, as a private detective, he did not always have the freedom or the money to follow his suspicions to the limit.

  “I would have taken the Baumeister case a lot further than I feel the police did,” he said. “While there were many fine moments in the investigation… I think there were certain loose ends that should have been tied up.”

  For example, while Baumeister was active in Fox Hollow Farm, his older brother in Texas was found dead in his pool.

  However the killings along I–70 did not stop with the death of Baumeister. On 4 May 2006, the body of 24-year-old Dusty Shuck was found by a motorist on I–70 near a truck stop in Frederick County, Maryland. Last seen in New Mexico on 24 April, she had died from a combination of blunt force trauma to the head and a slit throat. Her head was wrapped in blood-soaked cloth and, although fully dressed, she had no shoes.

  The I–70/I–35 Shootist

  During a 29-day killing spree running from 8 April to 7 May 1992, a man in his mid-to-late-twenties or early thirties killed five women and one man along the I–70, which runs from Utah to St Louis, and I–35 which branches off at Kansas City and heads south through Wichita, Oklahoma City and Dallas to Laredo on the Mexican border. The victims were shop assistants in stores within two miles of the two Interstates. The one male victim had long hair and an earring and the authorities believe that the killer mistook him for a woman. The killer also robbed his victims, but seemingly as an afterthought.

  The perpetrator was five foot seven inches tall and thin. He had sandy blond hair with a reddish tint and designer stubble. After a month, his killing spree stopped, leading the police to believe that he was in jail for some other offence. Then in 1993 he started killing again in Texas, where he shot three more women using the same .22 automatic pistol.

  Kansas City’s Independence Avenue Killer

  A serial killer has been killing women from Kansas City’s red light district around Independence Avenue and dumping them in the Missouri River, earning him the name the “Independence Avenue Killer” or the “Missouri River Killer”.

  The hunt began on 10 October 1996 when the body of 21-year-old Christy Fugate, aged 21, was pulled from the waters of the Missouri River near Dover in Lafayette County, Missouri, some 50 miles downriver from Kansas City. She had gone missing the previous month. Since then, nine more bodies of Kansas City women have been found downstream.

  On 29 March 1997, the body of Sherri Livingston was spotted in the river near where Christy Fugate had been found. She had been reporting missing in February. Three weeks later, on 22 April 1997, Connie Wallace-Byas’s body was recovered. She had been reported missing the previous October. The following day, the body of Linda Custer was found near Dover. She had gone missing in February. Two weeks after that, on 7 May, the body of Chandra Helsel was found 80 miles further on near Booneville. She had been missing since 17 April. On 31 July 1997, Wilmalee Manning’s body was recovered from the river. Then on 31 August, Lana Alvarez’s body was found. In March 1998, Maria Woods’ body was found in the river. On 2 April 1998, the mutilated bo
dy of Tammy Smith was found in the river near Sibly, just 25 miles downstream from Kansas City.

  All the victims were thought to be prostitutes working in the Independence Avenue area of Kansas City, Missouri. For once the police were quick to admit that a serial killer was at work as all the women were of approximately the same height and weight. They issued a warning that a serial killer was on the prowl, but few heeded it.

  Four more missing women are thought to have been the victims of the mysterious Missouri River Killer. They are 18-year-old Jennifer Conroy, who was last seen on 14 December 1993; 41-year-old Jamie Pankey, last seen 30 July 1996; 33-year-old Connie Williams, last seen 16 October 1996; and 20-year-old Cheresa Lordi, last seen 14 February 1997.

  The La Crosse Drownings

  At the end of September 1997, 28-year-old Chuck Blatz, a student at the University of Wisconsin’s Platteville campus, travelled from his home in Kiel, Wisconsin, to La Crosse for the annual Oktoberfest. He was five foot ten inches tall, weighed 130 pounds and had recently been honourably discharged from the military. On the night of Saturday, 27 September 1997 he was at Sneakers, a popular downtown bar and left some time after midnight. Five days later his body was pulled from the Mississippi River, that flows through La Crosse, by a fisherman. One of his socks was missing along with one of his black sneakers. Blatz was known to be a strong swimmer and a keen scuba diver. He was an unlikely victim of drowning.

  Two days after Blatz’s body was found, 19-year-old Anthony Skifton disappeared. Skifton was last seen alive at 2.30 a.m. on 5 October 1997, when he left a party carrying a case of beer. Five days later he was found floating in Swift Creek, not far from a gay cruising area. His bladder was empty and his flies unzipped. This led the authorities to believe that he had been urinating in the river when he slipped and fell into the freezing waters. However, Skifton was not a good drinker. He had a reputation for getting drunk and passing out early. Everyone would pounce on him with magic markers and he would wake up with writing all over his face. When his body was recovered the case of beer was missing. His death could easily have been accidental—had it not fitted into a disturbing pattern.

  On 22 February 1998 Nathan Kapfer, a 20-year-old baseball player who was attending nearby Viterbo College on an academic scholarship, went missing. At 5 foot 10 inches and weighing 150 pounds, he bore a striking resemblance to the other two missing boys. But the night he went missing, he turned up at a downtown pub called Brother’s Bar after having DJ’d at a local party. He was drunk and the bartender refused to serve him. When the bouncer was called to escort him out of the bar, Kapfer cursed. The police were called and he was arrested. At the police station he was given citations for underage drinking, disorderly conduct, possessing false identification and being in a bar under the age of 21. Then, at around 2 a.m., he was released. Soon after, his hat, wallet and the four tickets he had been given were found laid out neatly on the deck of a riverboat gift shop. His body was fished out of the water downstream six weeks later. A post mortem revealed that his blood alcohol level was 0.22 percent—above 0.15 percent you are considered drunk when driving. According to the authorities the evidence suggests that Kapfer had committed suicide. His death could have been an accident, or he could have been pushed.

  Then on 10 April 1999 Jeffery Geesey went missing. A 20-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, he did not return to his dorm that night. He was last seen in a bar on Third Street. Forty-one days later, on 22 May his body was found in the Big Muddy by two fishermen. The medical examiner classified the manner of death as “undetermined”. But unofficially, the police considered it a suicide as there were four shallow self-inflicted scars on his arms. But Geesey’s father said that, after an overnight stay in hospital visit, a psychological evaluation had determined. that when Jeff cut himself, he was upset—but not suicidal.

  There was other evidence to suggest that Jeff Geesey did not kill himself. The bloodhound used to search for him hit on a scent that indicates Geesey experienced trauma in several locations. At the Niedbalski Bridge, around a mile from Third Street, the dog found Geesey’s blood.

  “She was licking the pavement,” said Penny Bell, the dog’s handler. “But there was no forensics follow-up.”

  La Crosse police chief Ed Kondracki was sceptical.

  “Things she said those dogs could do, dogs can’t do,” he said.

  Like the other young men the river had claimed, Jeff Geesey was young and fit—6 foot 2 inches tall and 200 pounds. And he was a little drunk when he went missing. However, for four strapping young men to drown in the river in the space of two years seemed like too much of a coincidence. The theory circulated that a serial killer was at work.

  The police, however, dismissed it. The deaths were classified as “exceptional clearance”, meaning that they were not witnessed and there was no evidence to suggest that a crime had been committed. Consequently, they must have been accidents or self-inflicted and the trail went cold.

  Then on the night of 9 April 2004, Jared Dion and his brother Adam went out with their friends. It was a cold night, in the low 40s, and a chill wind blew through La Crosse. But it was a Friday night and the students from the University of Wisconsin went out drinking. Jared Dion was a 21-year-old sophomore, 5 foot 9 inches tall and weighing 172 pounds. And he was fit. An outstanding athlete at high school, he was a member of the college wrestling team. That night he was drunk, but no more drunk than the other college revellers and few took any notice when he staggered out of the bar. Five days later, his body was fished out of the Mississippi.

  Authorities said his death an accident. The post mortem found that he had drowned and his blood-alcohol level was a massive 0.28 percent, nearly twice the level at which the law considers a person to be intoxicated. The police maintain that he was drunk, wandered too close to the river and fell in.

  However, there was one inconvenient fact that spoiled this picture. Dion’s white Boston Red Sox baseball cap was found neatly hanging from a post on the riverbank near to the spot the police assumed he fell in. Did he take it off and hang it there before he plunged into the water? Police Chief Kondracki said that a group of joggers passing by had seen it on the ground and one of them had picked it up and put it there. However, the joggers say that the cap was already on the post and they did not touch it.

  The fact that five muscular young men had all died in the same way was, the police maintained, a coincidence. La Crosse was a college town with a culture of heavy drinking. And when young men are drunk, accidents happen. But long-time residents wondered why it had never happened before. Others asked why other riverside college towns, such as Winona, Minnesota—25 miles upstream—did not suffer from a similar string of drownings. The idea that a serial killer was at work began to circulate again.

  Everyone had their own theory. Perhaps La Crosse had its own cold-weather version of Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute in Florida who took her revenge on men by killing her clients. Maybe the killer was a taxi driver who offered his drunken victims a ride home, or a homicidal cop was prowling the streets at night.

  Talk of a serial killer on the loose became so pervasive that Kondracki took the unprecedented step of calling a town meeting which was broadcast live on local TV. One of those fielding the questions was Police Lieutenant Dan Marcou, who was also the uncle of one of the five boys who died in the river and “fought back tears as he chastised the crowd,” a reporter said.

  “The La Crosse Police Department investigated all of these [deaths] thoroughly,” Marcou insisted. “I have to listen to people applaud at the thought that my nephew was killed by a serial killer. This community is like an alcoholic. It would rather think that a killer is on the loose than admit that it’s got a drinking problem.”

  However critics pointed out that the police had dismissed the idea that a killer or killers were responsible for some or all of the deaths too readily and had failed to investigate any of the deaths as possible homicides.

  The U
niversity of Wisconsin was also eager to crush the idea that a serial killer was at work in their seat. The chair of the psychology department Betsy Morgan, who has taught at the university for ten years, did not buy it. She and the criminal-justice professor Kim Vogt wrote an open letter to students called “Why We Are 99.9 Percent Sure It Is Not A Serial Killer”, pointing out that students and the local brewing industry would rather believe that a serial killer was at large than examine their own penchant for excessive drinking. It concluded with a homily on Occcam’s razor: “When you hear hooves behind you, you should expect to see horses, not zebras… In the case of Jared Dion and other students who have drowned in the past several years, the ‘horse’ diagnosis is ‘alcohol’ while the ‘zebra’ plays the part of the ‘serial killer.’ It was a plain old tragic accident that took the life of [Jared Dion] and the others who drowned.”

  Vogt also dismissed it fact that all the victims shared specific physical characteristics. While it is true that serial killers are often drawn to victims who were similar in looks and age and occupation, the population of northern Midwest is unusually homogeneous. College towns attract a disproportionate number of young men who go out at night and get drunk.

  “The coincidence that people always pull up is that they’re all college-age, they all have brown hair and they’re all white,” Vogt said. “Well, that describes 95 percent of our population… a serial killer would have to really hunt to find a young man who didn’t match the profile of the victims.”

  She also pointed out that, statistically, young men are ten times more likely than young women to die by drowning.