Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  The book’s complete title and byline was Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View by Stephen Stanko, Wayne Gillespie, and Gordon A. Crews.

  Stanko and Crews had had frequent phone conversations when Stanko was in prison. Then, like now, Stanko mostly griped. Stanko told Crews it was tough on the outside being an ex-con. Nobody wanted to hire the guy who was just out. Crews reminded him that he was a guy with a lot of skills, and to think positively.

  Stanko hit Crews up for money. He tried to sell his future royalties from the book to Crews, who said he should be writing again. Just because he was a free man didn’t mean he had to stop writing. He wasn’t a prisoner/writer. He was a writer!

  Stanko wanted to write another book, to use his extraordinary experience and scientific knowledge, not to mention intuition, to teach the world a precious lesson about some other topic that wasn’t “living in prison.”

  Stanko gave some thought to the topic of his new yet-to-be-written book. He kicked around a few ideas and decided: serial killers. He’d always been interested in the subject. It would be cool to become an expert.

  That decided, Stanko’s trips to the Socastee library became purposeful. Multipurposed even. He read all day, and kept copious notes. And when he was taking a break, he was chatting—quietly, of course—with his girlfriend.

  He thought about being comprehensive, to learn about every serial killer in history, their MOs, their body count, their signature. The book could be like an encyclopedia. It could work. There was that much public interest. There had even been serial killer trading cards a few years back.

  Maybe he wouldn’t make it comprehensive. For one thing, it had been done; for another, he figured the book would be better with a more narrow scope.

  He would focus—look in minute detail—on the serial killers he found most fascinating. Six to ten killers for the whole book—the serial killers who appealed to Stanko more than the others.

  Like many modern-day enthusiasts, Stanko observed serial killers with something that greater resembled admiration than disdain. There was a definite hierarchy, guys who stood out. Guys with superior bloodthirstiness and perversion. Members of the—drumroll—“Serial Killer Hall of Fame.”

  He had a notebook that he was filling with notes from the books he read in the library. He also spent a lot of time in periodicals. He printed news and magazine articles about hard-core crime from the library’s microfilm archives and kept a scrapbook.

  Which killers to include? Some were a lock.

  Like “Zodiac,” for example. ID unknown. Bastard got away with it. Terrorized millions for years. He was the original masked gunman prowling lovers’ lanes in Northern California, shooting and stabbing young lovers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  This was before the big Zodiac movie. All he knew, he learned from books. Stephen Stanko liked Zodiac a lot. He was psychologically terrifying, and he backed it up with death.

  Plus, his terror campaign was visual. He had a Zodiac costume that he wore when he went out to perforate young white women—like every day was Halloween.

  To some extent movies such as Halloween and Friday the 13th were based on Zodiac, who added the “masked homicidal maniac stalking teenagers” theme to the big picture of serial murders!

  One of Zodiac’s intended victims—the male half of a necking couple that the killer ambushed beside a lake—survived Zodiac’s stabbing, although his girlfriend was murdered. He saw Zodiac, and lived to talk about it.

  Zodiac’s shirt, the survivor saw, had a circle with crosshairs over it, a symbol he had also used in his letters and other written communications. The killer wore a sack, square at the top, over his head, with eyeholes cut in it. As he was being stabbed, the survivor saw that Zodiac was wearing glasses inside his spooky hood.

  In his letters, Zodiac made the cops and the press look stupid, jerking them around with an unbreakable code that he promised would, if deciphered, identify him.

  Although some of Zodiac’s codes were solved, the one with his name in it was not. He was taunting the cops, yanking them around. His letters described a bloodlust only appeased by murder, and a raging misogyny, all cloaked in a crude attempt at far-out 1969 hippie vernacular. Zodiac thought shooting chicks was the “ultimate trip.”

  Criminal profilers, professional and amateur alike, analyzed the many clues Zodiac supplied, and tried to figure out what kind of guy he was. Many theorized that the Zodiac had been a military man—perhaps a sailor.

  Like Dad, Stanko thought.

  Stanko had Zodiac pegged as not much of a stud. If he was any kind of lover boy, he’d have worked it so that he got a piece before he snuffed them. Stanko assumed a lot of these “gun does my talking” types suffered from erectile dysfunction.

  At the scene of a cabdriver’s murder in San Francisco, a bloody fingerprint, presumed to belong to Zodiac, was found. Over the years, there had been a handful of suspects in the Zodiac murders. Some didn’t pan out, and some stuck around.

  The best suspect was the late Arthur Leigh Allen, whose spending records revealed him to be frequently in Zodiac’s vicinity. He also had proximity with several of the victims, and may have been an acquaintance with one of the victims. His handwriting looked like Zodiac’s; he had a history of doing really sick things; and his demeanor, when he was questioned, was oddly defiant, very much the type of personality to use the mail to laugh at authority figures, while simultaneously terrifying all of Northern California. Some said the case against Allen was a construct of a true-crime writer, and, in reality, was much weaker than presented. Allen was said in a couple of books to have received a speeding ticket in the vicinity of one murder. This was declared untrue by a third source. Plus, his thumbprint didn’t match the bloody one found at one of the murder scenes.

  One thing that everyone could agree on, Stanko discovered, was that Zodiac—along with Charles Manson and the murder at Altamont—was part of that “death of the counterculture” gestalt, symbols of the end of an era, the 1960s—such a hopeful decade turned horrible by violence—giving way to the disastrous 1970s.

  The killer not only wrote taunting letters to police and press, sometimes using code, but he established his bona fides in a shiveringly creepy fashion, enclosing in the envelopes bloodstained cloth torn from a victim’s shirt.

  Maybe, some theorized, Zodiac was more than one guy. Did a conspiracy theory fit? Maybe the one writing the letters was never the one shooting the gun. Paranoids noted that the case resembled a military mindcontrol experiment that had gotten out of hand.

  There were a lot of theories—some almost solid, others wacko—and the Zodiac letters continued for years. One guy thought that he turned into the “Unabomber.” Zodiac claimed for years in his writing that he was still killing people; after the initial burst of murders, no more bodies could positively be linked to him.

  In some ways, Stanko thought, the Zodiac killer was the most legendary of the serial killers.

  Stephen Stanko also exhaustively researched “Son of Sam,” aka David Berkowitz. Son of Sam was a derivation of the Zodiac theme a few years later. He also shot teenagers and young adults in the nighttime.

  Unlike Zodiac who prowled the plentiful desolation of Northern California, Son of Sam patrolled the side streets of New York City. He found victims on front stoops, walking down the sidewalk, and (like Zodiac) necking in parked cars.

  Son of Sam always used the same gun: a fearsome .44 bulldog. He shot couples or females alone. Never males alone. Because of the girth of his bullets, he cruelly maimed the victims he didn’t kill.

  Like Zodiac, Son of Sam wrote taunting letters to the police and press. But the East Coast version was an upgrade in a way. His prose was written by a deviant poet, exhibiting a well-honed terroristic craft. Stanko was a writer and noticed the difference right away.

  The similarities in the messages of mayhem were compelling as well. The chilling taunts of the Zodiac and the Rimbaud-like p
rose-poetry of Son of Sam bubbled up from the same misogynistic vat.

  Berkowitz was caught and arrested, and the police said he was the Son of Sam. But, just as some people believed Zodiac was a team effort, there was a compelling theory that Berkowitz did not act alone. Perhaps Son of Sam, which referred to itself as a group in the letters, was a Devil-worshipping cult, holding meetings in a cave in a park north of the city, a club of death, in which the same .44 was passed around so that every satanic member had an opportunity to kill with it. The killing only stopped when one of them was caught, and he took the rap for everybody.

  A writer searched Westchester County in search of this cult and found evidence that it existed—in a park, in a cave decorated with satanic symbolism.

  The theories grew wackier. One suggested that the Sam kills were filmed from a van always in the vicinity, those snuff films going for top dollar to the pervs who paid for that junk.

  How good could those films be? Stanko wondered—if they did exist. They were shooting at night from a distance. To get any kicks out of the kills, you’d need a camera getting close-ups inside the cars where the carnage was.

  At first, Berkowitz confessed to all thirteen shootings. He had a loony tunes tale to tell: Sam was a cranky neighbor who worshipped the Devil, drank blood, and sent messages to Berkowitz via the incessant barking of his dog, Harvey. Berkowitz said he acted alone, and cops, eager to wrap up the nightmare, were eager to believe him.

  Later, Berkowitz said he’d only done a couple of the shootings, that others had pulled the .44’s trigger as well. Then he had his throat slashed in prison and claimed to have “found God.”

  Stephen Stanko discovered Ted Bundy–land, a vast continent of research on the crown prince of serial killers. There were people who thought Bundy was the most fascinating serial killer of all time. He combined the looks and charm of a swinging bachelor with an unquenchable thirst to kill as many pretty young girls as he could.

  Now here was a guy that Stanko could identify with. A chick magnet/snuff artist. Bundy helped launch the career of the legendary true-crime writer Ann Rule, who worked beside him and never sensed the evil.

  Bundy was a 1970s serial killer, and the fun part here was the way Bundy continued to lie about and cover up his murders, even as the evidence mounted against him, and his charm and powers of persuasion were such that he always had allies right up until the end.

  Although most experts believed Bundy killed at least thirty-five people, when Bundy finally confessed, he admitted to only thirty. He was a rapist, a necrophiliac, and a postmortem surgeon.

  After seducing his always lovely victims into a private moment, he took them by surprise—either coming up from behind or sometimes accosting them as they slept—and rapidly bludgeoned them into unconsciousness.

  On some occasions, the bludgeoning itself turned out to be fatal; but in some other cases, after they were knocked out, he would become intimate and manually strangle them.

  Bundy did not give up his freedom easily. After one of his arrests, he escaped by jumping out a second-story courthouse window. Hurting his ankle in the fall, he limped around free for a short while.

  He was a nomadic killer. He killed in the American Northwest, on the salt flats, and in the Rocky Mountains. He killed in Florida, and it was there that he was caught the last time and eventually was pushed into the electric chair. Predictably, he had gone to his execution kicking and screaming.

  Stanko thought Bundy’s modus operandi was worthy of extra thought. Hit ’em over the head, knock them out or make them groggy, and then get intimate. There would be a lot less potentially harmful rasslin’ that way.

  One of the newest serial killers who was Hall of Fame worthy was “BTK,” another writer of taunting letters. BTK was an acronym for bind, torture, and kill. He did his thing in Wichita, Kansas.

  BTK was different, because although FBI profilers would have called it impossible, he ran off a string of murders that terrified Kansas, stopped, and then came back a generation later to create a second nightmare for that city.

  The BTK case had some things going for it, in a fetishistic way. Lots of bondage. Dude was into rope—exquisite restraint. Military men knew their knots!

  His first kills occurred in a spree: He wiped out most of a family, stringently binding them before asphyxiating them slowly. Found dead were the dad, the mom, and little brother on the main floor, and little sister hanging from the rafters of the basement, her toes only inches above the floor, pants pulled down and smeared with semen. The older siblings came home from school that day and found themselves alone in the world.

  That pervy stuff was one thing, but Stephen Stanko really latched onto him because BTK had literary aspirations. The killer wrote letters and sent creepy drawings. He illustrated one of his crime scenes in a graphic and horribly accurate way—like Zodiac and Son of Sam might’ve if they’d had artistic skills. His most troubling drawing was accurate right down to the placement of the furniture in the victim’s bedroom, to the position of the victim’s eyeglasses on top of her dresser.

  For almost thirty years, no one had a clue who BTK could be. Might be your next-door neighbor. His career was like a movie sequel. He BTK’d a bunch of victims, hibernated for years, and then came back.

  Another reason Stanko liked this case was because it made the straights of Wichita—the cops and the press and the political leaders—seem really stupid. Law enforcement became so desperate, it did silly things.

  Those knuckleheads had heard of subliminal advertising, like when movie theaters had inserted single frames of Coke and popcorn during a movie, and supposedly sales went up. It was supposed to work on the subconscious without the conscious mind even knowing it. Like Keystone Kops, the police rigged a TV show about BTK—they knew BTK would be watching.

  During the program, which would review in detail all of BTK’s kills and communications, they would subliminally insert a symbol the killer used in his letters, sort of a BTK logo that hadn’t been made public. That was accompanied by a photo of a telephone and a drawing of an Indian chief. Out of that, the killer was supposed to subconsciously understand the message: “BTK, call the chief,” as in the chief of police. BTK did not call.

  But he did eventually get caught, a generation later. Dennis Rader did himself in by purposefully leaving clue after clue, until, unaware of the sophistication of cyber sleuthing, his computer gave him up.

  Some days when Stephen Stanko came into the library, he studied not a serial killer but a famous murder, such as the murder of Beth Short in 1947 Hollywood, better known as the “Black Dahlia” murder.

  This was a good one because there were photos. Beth Short was a rather lazy black-haired starlet who came from New England to Hollywood to be a star. Instead, she ended up floating around Southern California, accepting donations from various escorts.

  The last stranger she found herself with tortured her for days, carving her flesh and slicing a Sardonicus-like smile into her cheeks. That brutally inflicted rictus came last, and she drowned in her own blood.

  Her remains were drained of blood by her killer. She was surgically sliced in two at the waist and placed in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles.

  Stanko stared at the photos of the pale and mutilated form lying obscenely like a broken manikin only a few inches from the sidewalk. The photos were in black and white, and you could feel the evil juju coming off them. They hearkened back to the days of film noir, dark movies he’d seen as a kid—all fedoras, bullet bras, and shadow.

  What must it have been like to be there and see that bisected nude body? It was almost too intense to think about.

  The shelves of the library were rich with Black Dahlia books, everybody and their mother thought they knew who had killed the Black Dahlia. At least two unrelated people claimed it was their father. But no one knew who it was. He—or they—got away with it. Like Zodiac, wreaking havoc in the world, and walking.

  As Stephen Stanko
researched killer after killer, one of his favorites—one he would return to, again and again, re-reading passages that he was already familiar with—was the prolific Gary Ridgway, aka “The Green River Killer.” He killed so many.

  There were different ways to rank the serial killers, but number of victims was the most scientific, and Ridgway was right up there. When he finally confessed, in 2001, he recalled murdering at least forty-eight women.

  The murders took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Ridgway killed both white and black women—when the assumption of the time was that heterosexual serial killers usually stuck to the opposite sex, but the same race. Not Ridgway. He was an equal-opportunity killer, choking his victims sometimes with his arm and sometimes using a ligature.

  He committed his crimes near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and earned his nickname by using the Green River as his initial dump site. The disposal ground, Stanko figured, was probably a matter of convenience rather than aesthetics—“down by the river” being a place where a fellow could have some privacy. Although he did spread his kills out over two decades, the great majority of them occurred in quick succession from 1982 to 1984.

  Unlike a lot of serial killers, Ridgway wasn’t very bright, with a two-digit IQ. Stanko certainly couldn’t identify with that. Stanko was a flippin’ genius.

  Ridgway committed his first violent act at sixteen and stabbed a six-year-old boy. Stanko read about Ridgway’s troubled mind. “I’d always wondered what it felt like to kill someone,” Ridgway said of his youth, and Stanko could feel him, man.

  Ridgway had served in Vietnam, aboard a navy patrol boat. Like Arthur Shawcross (“The Genesee River Killer”) in Rochester, New York, he graduated from harming children to murdering women down on their luck, prostitutes and runaways.