The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  When he was twenty-one, Todd married Carole Holman, though he had been having an affair with Lynn Noyes, who had been a "groupie" when Todd was still running his band. Having tired of Carole seven years later, he wanted to resume his relationship with Lynn on a full-time basis. As an added inconvenience, Carole was eight months pregnant. Revving up his gift of gab to the max, Todd convinced both Norman and Dale that Carole was an "evil woman from the IRA" who was threatening others, and that they needed to join his Company and assassinate Carole before she got the chance to kill them. Realizing there was a fee for such services, Todd took out insurance policies of $125,000 for himself and for Carole so each would have something in case the other died39-a sum that would more than cover the amounts he promised his hit men friends. Then, on May 16, 1998, Dale Gordon shot Carole to death (with one of the five shots directed at her abdomen, killing the eight-monthold fetus) as she lay asleep. Growing remorseful afterward, Dale confessed to the authorities. As the plot involved Dale, Norman, Todd, and Lynn, all four were arrested and ultimately convicted. Todd, as the mastermind and psychopath, was quickly converted from con man to convict, and was given the death penalty. He has never confessed. The prosecutor in the case, Greg Gaul, having read Robert Scott's account of the murder, warned the public: "Don't believe everything you hear," referring to Todd's flamboyant lies, and adding, "There are evil people out there ... and Todd Garton was an evil person. 1140 Given the timing of the murder (Carole was in her eighth month of pregnancy), there is good reason to suspect that the "why?" of this case has much to do with the utter refusal on Todd's part to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood.

  Sante Kimes

  Sante Kimes and her son Kenny Jr. achieved notoriety in the summer of 1998 for the murder and disappearance of a wealthy New York widow, Irene Silverman. This was but the last in a dizzying and lifelong career of theft, conning, escape, and murder, stretching back to Sante's childhood, and later, to her tutelage of her own son in the ways of crime.41 Just to list the complete catalog of Sante's crimes and her many aliases would about double the length of this chapter. Readers with a fascination for the macabre may wish to read either Adrian Havill's book The Mother; the Son, and the Socialite or his shorter account featured on the Crime Library Web site .41

  Sante was born in 1934 in Oklahoma, the third of four children. Her mother was Irish; her father, Rattan Singhrs, was from India. A few years later the family moved to California. The father deserted and the mother became a prostitute, the children ending up in orphanages or foster homes. For a time, Sante was a street child in Los Angeles, where she was arrested at age nine for stealing food. She had apparently also been sexually abused. This was her situation until a woman suggested to her sister and brother-in-law that they adopt her, which they eagerly did. Now as Sante Chambers, she was a high school student, who was known as a cheerleader and boy-crazy flirt. She also began shoplifting and using her stepfather's credit cards to steal. After high school she married, briefly, first to Lee Powers, and then to Ed Walker, by whom she had a son, Kent Walker. Attractive at that stage of her life, she was sometimes mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor. This proved a help in her scams and thefts, including an auto theft she carried off by conning a dealer into letting her test-drive a new Cadillac, alone. She simply drove off with it, and when she was eventually caught, she told the police she was "still testing it." For a time she worked as a prostitute in Los Angeles. Somehow, and stories differ on this, she met up with a self-made millionaire, Kenneth Kimes (Big Ken), in 1971. He was seventeen years older. Sante had a son by him, and she gave herself and the boy the Kimes name, even though they were not as yet married. Despite Kimes's wealth, Sante continued to steal and began teaching her son, Kenneth Kareem Kimes (Ken Jr.), the tricks of the trade.

  Big Ken was no more weighted down with scruples than was Sante; the two now plotted to meet the great and near-great in Washington, DC. They touted themselves as "honorary ambassadors" and even crashed a party at the house of Vice President Gerald Ford. Although it was no longer necessary economically to steal, Sante stole for the thrill of it: at another gathering in DC she contrived to steal a mink coat lying on a chair, by donning first the mink and then over it her own coat. Arrested for that, she evaded trial for five years with one excuse after the other, and when declared guilty, she simply disappeared. Whenever ensconced in her luxurious La Jolla home with the two Kens, Sante hired maids from Mexico, whom she then enslaved in cruel ways-branding one with a hot iron, locking another in a closet, striking others for not cooking a meal the way Sante liked it. For these cruelties she was arrested and for the first time actually went to prison-for three years, until her release in 1989.

  Apart from her abusiveness toward servants, Sante had so far confined her activities to property crimes. That was to change. Now, with the cooperation of Ken Jr., she embarked on a more ambitious career of conning-and killing-rich people. When a lawyer conspired with Sante and Ken Jr. to burn down one of their homes for insurance money, he boasted about it to strangers in a bar. The authorities learned of this and convinced him to be an informant. Sante and Ken invited him to join them on vacation in Central America-a trip from which she and her son returned, but not the lawyer. His body has never been found. In the Bahamas, they fooled and later killed banker Sayed Bilal Ahmed and then went on to make some real estate deals with David Kazdin, an old friend of Sante's now dead husband (who managed to die of natural causes). But when Kazdin didn't go along with Sante's scams and was about to inform against her, he ended up shot to death, his body then deposited unceremoniously in a dumpster.

  Having heard about Irene Silverman, a wealthy Fifth Avenue widow, Sante and Ken moved to New York to launch a still more ambitious scheme: to rent a suite of rooms at her mansion, use their con artist abilities to get into the woman's good graces, forge a document that gave over the mansion to Sante and Ken, kill her, and then make the body "disappear." With Sante assiduously practicing Silverman's handwriting, they went through with the entire plan, lugging Irene's body out of the Fifth Avenue mansion boxed up in a big trunk, returning later with the forged document supposedly conveying the place to the Kimes. But Sante had made a careless phone call to a man she then invited to run the New York property. The FBI were onto him; he cooperated with the authorities, incriminating evidence was found (including paper on which Sante had practiced Irene's handwriting over and over), and Sante and Ken were arrested. Irene's body has never been found-a fact that Ken thought would shield them from the police. As Ken (perhaps another admirer of Stalin) told the court: No body, no crime. Both are now serving life sentences. I thought it might be interesting to interview Sante, since she is incarcerated in a women's prison just thirty miles north of my office. She answered my letter in a most gracious manner, giving me to believe that she had been the victim of false accusations. The interview never took place, nor do I think that, even if it did, her account of her story would bear the stamp of truth.

  A COMMENT ON WIFE MURDERERS

  I noted earlier that as we move up the Gradations of Evil scale, we move away from reactive or "impulsive" murders toward murders and other acts of violence that are more and more premeditated or "instrumental."

  In America, spouse murders are, in general, committed twice as often by husbands as by wives.43 In the numerous biographies I have surveyed, where spousal murders were often of the instrumental type, a comparable ratio existed: there were two and a half times as many husbands (114) who murdered their wives as there were wives (44) who murdered a husband. All but two of the men were white (there was a black physician and a black dentist). Impulsive wife murders accounted for only one case in nine. We have already mentioned three such men (Gingerich, Rowe, and Skiadopoulos) in earlier chapters. All the rest were "schemers." This is a much higher ratio than we would see in the whole population, where murder on impulse is the rule, even in the murder of a spouse.

  Men are, in general, more aggressive than women: wife battering is common, husban
d battering is rare. This means that wives who kill their husbands have usually been provoked by physical abuse, though I also found in my series of "schemers" that the women in almost half the cases killed for insurance money. The motives of the men were occasionally to get insurance money (one in ten), but much more often they had to do with jealousy, anger at the wife for demanding a divorce, or wanting to be with a mistress. Those three motives accounted for three out of five of the cases. One man in ten killed to protect himself from public disgrace, as when the wife was aware of some sordid and illegal action and was about to tell the authorities. In one case the wife found out her husband, who claimed to be a medical student, was an imposter.44 In another, the wife learned that her husband was a crooked attorney involved in get-rich schemes with illegal drugs.45

  Homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States.46 In this chapter we sketched the case of Todd Garton; there were three others in my series, including the more well-known case of Scott Peterson, who killed his wife, Laci, also when she was in her eighth month of pregnancy.41 It was not the wife but the unborn child that pushed these men over the edge.

  But of all the things I learned from looking at the histories of wife murderers, the most remarkable were these two points: the men hardly ever confessed, even when convicted, and they staged the wife's body to make it look like death was "accidental"-or used a hit man. These measures were the rule rather than the exception among the "schemers" (that is, the husbands who committed premeditated murder). Confession was common in the impulsive husbands (7 out of 10); only one in five among the "schemers" ever confessed. Both these qualities contribute to the aura of evil that surrounds these cases of wife murder. The vast majority of people are incapable of lying with anything like the poise and facility that the psychopath brings to this task. In contrast, the vast majority of people, though in their mind they may now and again plot to hurt or kill someone who has deeply offended them, have adequate inner controls that slam the brakes on these vengeful thoughts, which then whither and disappear.

  Chapter Five

  SPREE AND

  MASS MURDER

  Evil by the Numbers

  Canto XXVIII, II. 1-6

  Chi porta mai put con parole sciolte dicer del sangue e de le piaghe a pieno ch'i' ora vidi, per narrar piu volte? Ogne lingua per certo verria meno per lo nostro sermone e per la mente c'hanno a tanto comprender poco seno.

  Who could ever, even with unfettered tongue, tell in full of the blood and wounds I now saw, Though he should narrate them many times? Every tongue would surely fail, because our language and our memory have little capacity to comprehend so much.

  ost of the stories I've described have been about men and women who have killed just one other person. There were a few examples of "multiple" killers, mentioned to illustrate a particular point, usually about motive. Since we will be concentrating in this chapter on two different kinds of multiple murder, some definitions are in order by way of sidestepping the confusion that surrounds this term.

  We speak of a spree murder when someone kills a number of people in spurts over a period of a few days or weeks; sometimes longer. The "someone" can even be a couple, as in the famous Depression-era case of Bonnie and Clyde.' Another famous couple were Charles Starkweather and his young girlfriend, Caril Fugate, who killed eleven people during their month-long shooting spree in Nebraska in 1958.2

  Technically, mass murder refers to the killing of four or more persons at one point in time, all within one day3-as in the case of the Texas Tower murders by Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in Austin, August 1, 1966. The death toll in that case was fourteen plus Whitman's wife and mother, whom he had killed before ascending the tower. Sometimes the word massacre is used instead of murder-in the lay language and in the press-as in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of seven men in Chicago, most of them members of the Bugs Moran gang, by four members of Al Capone's rival South Side gang in 1929. Massacre is a stronger term, conveying more sharply the shock and horror that people experience in hearing (or worse yet, witnessing) a mass murder. In my review of several hundred mass murders since 1900, three facts stand out. First, guns (whether rifles or pistols) are far and away the weapons most commonly used. It is very difficult to commit mass murder with a knife, since the killer can more easily be subdued by some of the intended victims. Second, the average number of victims in mass murder is about eight, although there are a few cases where dozens are killed. We saw one example earlier: the mass murder by arson of eighty-seven people at the Happy Land dancehall. The greatest death toll in a mass murder involving a gun is fifty-seven: Bum-Kon Woo was a Korean police officer in 1982. Disillusioned about his career and recently rejected by his fiancee, he went around a town near Seoul shooting everyone he could find, before using the gun on himself. Arson and bombs are rarer instruments of mass murder but obviously have much greater potential for destruction.

  The number of victims is a key factor in the sense of evil surrounding mass murder, particularly because there is usually nothing personal about the crime: the object is merely to kill as many strangers as possible. This at least is the typical scenario. There are a few rare exceptions to the rule, as when a mass murder is committed as a byproduct of a lethal act directed at one specific person, with all the other victims ending up as, to use military jargon, "collateral damage." The most spectacular example of this phenomenon is that of Jack Gilbert Graham, to be discussed shortly.

  The third fact: mass murder is almost without exception a man's crime. In the rare case where the perpetrator was a woman, several people were shot, but only one died-in what would have to be called mass murder manque. The attempted mass murder failed, fortunately, most likely because the female perpetrator had less practice with firearms than her male counterparts. Women in general are less apt to become avid hunters, less likely to own guns and practice shooting than men. As an example, Jillian Robbins, a nineteen-year-old about to be discharged from the Army Reserves, walked onto the University of Pennsylvania campus in 1996 and began shooting at students. Despite her experience in the reserves, she apparently did not become a proficient marksman. As it turned out, she killed only one person and wounded another before she was tackled and subdued.4

  One other term, serial killing, is too often used in an imprecise way that does not distinguish it from spree murder and does not make clear which of the various types of actual serial killing one is referring to. Serial killing encompasses those cases where murders are separated by fairly long periods of time, typically weeks or months. When people hear the phrase "serial killer," however, they usually think serial sexual homicidea topic I will expand on in a later chapter. Although serial sexual homicide is rare, it is the most commonly encountered variety of "serial killing." A second variety comes under the heading of "Angel of Death." The Angel of Death in these cases is a medical professional-most commonly a doctor or a nurse who has easy access to lethal medicines. The usual victims are hospitalized patients, though in the notorious case of England's Dr. Harold Shipman, the victims were men and women, some in hospitals, some living at home, who were part of his patient roster.5 He murdered several hundred patients (the exact number will never be known)-mostly with opiates.

  Besides these two types, there are several other types of nonsexual serial killers. There are the mothers who smother to death one infant after another (usually with intervals of a year or more between each murder); misanthropic men who kill at intervals men, women, and children, out of their general hatred of humankind (and with no sexual motif); and a few one-of-a-kind types-which I will mention in the next chapter.

  SPREE MURDER

  One of the most humbling experiences in my exploration of evil was my meeting with the former spree killer Archibald McCafferty in the spring of 2007. Up until that time, what I knew of spree killers and mass murder came only from books. This put me at the mercy of the accuracy and, at times, the prejudices of the men and women who wrote these books
. Since the killers had done terrible things-things the public, and the authors, regarded as loathsome, evil-those feelings filtered down into me as well. Because most spree killers and mass murderers die by suicide or police action, we often imagine that the way they were-in personality and behavior-at the time they died is the way they would always have been, had they survived. We could never know, for example, if Charles Starkweather might one day have overcome his antisocial ways had he lived into his fifties. He was all of twenty when he killed all those people in 1958, but even though he lived to face trial in court, the death penalty that was handed down came swiftly in those days: he died in the electric chair a year later, still basically a wild and vengeful adolescent.

  I first became acquainted with McCafferty through a book ominously titled Never to Be Released by Paul Kidd.6 The story was not encouraging. McCafferty was born in 1949 in Glasgow, Scotland. When he was eight or nine, people already thought of him as "trouble": trouble, in his case, consisted of truancy, theft, cutting girls' hair, strangling cats and dogs, burglary, vandalism, and tossing snakes and mice to scare people. His father, who was extremely abusive and physically punitive (in a fruitless effort to socialize his son) before and after Archie's early years, thought things would improve if the whole family moved to Australia to give Archie a new start. In Sydney, however, Archie was no different; at age ten he became an "incorrigible juvenile delinquent," doing the same property crimes as he had done back in Glasgow. He had been in and out of jail and reformatories many times and had thirty-five convictions by age twenty-four, some of which were for stealing cars and assault. He had an explosive temper, fueled in part by his abuse of alcohol and the whole menu of illicit drugs: LSD, angel dust, heroin, marijuana, amphetamines, and barbiturates. So far, not a very encouraging history! As Ovid knew, however, amor omnia vincit: Love conquers all. And for a time, it seemed as though love was the magic ingredient that was going to make Archie settle down into a peaceful life.