The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  Their intended victim happened to be Phil's next-door neighbor, a black woman of forty-two, Jane Nora Guillory (known by her friends as Genore), who, unlike Phil and his gang, was a highly respected member of the community, had a good job in Baton Rouge, was loved by all, and was known for being "generous to a fault. 1115 Genore lived alone in much better circumstances than Phil and his family, and not only gave the Skippers food for Phil and his wife's baby, as well as diapers and money for other necessities, she even included them in her will-and made them aware of that. Despite her generosity, Phil got angry at Genore when Phil's dog (cared for temporarily by Genore) ate his pet goat. That was the "trigger." Phil, in the company of his sister, Hoyt, and Johnny, barged into Genore's house and proceeded to stab, shoot, and bludgeon her to death-to the point of rendering her face unrecognizable. The men also raped Genore's corpse, careful to use condoms, so as to leave no DNA. Though illiterate, Phil had the fiendish cleverness to pay a black man to ejaculate into a cup, so Phil could then toss the semen over Genore's body, by way of making the police assume the killer had been a black. Phil and his crew then returned to their "profession" of robbing graves for jewelry and gold, which they melted down to obscure its origins. Justice was delayed because of their scheme to use another man's semen, but eventually Johnny, still a juvenile, was persuaded to turn state's evidence in exchange for a lighter sentence. Phil, Hoyt, and Lisa all received life sentences. Sheriff Talmadge Bunch, involved with the case, said of Lisa, "That's an evil, evil girl ... she comes from an evil family,"36 a sentiment shared by the prosecutor, Sam D'Aquilla: "Those are some evil people." Even in the next chapter, devoted to serial sexual homicide and torture, we will not encounter many examples of atrocities in peacetime that match the murder of Genore Guillory.

  Jeff Lundgren

  In chapter 1 I gave a brief account of Jeff Lundgren, the leader of a selfstyled Mormon cult and self-professed Prophet of God. His sadism was a thing apart from his murders: when the Avery family became disenchanted with Lundgren, he shot them one at a time in the back of the head-a painless death for each. Sadism exists quite independent of murder. The emphasis on murder cases in this section (and in this whole book) has to do with the fact that murder, compared with other acts of violence or purely psychological torture, is usually more fully documented. As for Lundgren, he cannot lay claim to being the outstanding con artist/cult leader. Jim Jones in Guyana and even David Koresh in Waco, Texas, both megalomaniacs like Lundgren, gathered larger flocks of the gullible. But none outdid Lundgren in sadism. In a way, the Averys got off easy. Before killing them in that relatively painless way, he told his "faithful" that he had "searched the Scriptures" and had found the proper punishment for the disobedient: the men were to be cut in two; the women, to be slit across the abdomen with a sword so their organs spilled out; the children, to be swung by their heels and smashed against a wall so their brains spilled out.37

  Like his more successful "rogue messiahs,"38 he felt he was entitled to have sex with, or to make into supplementary wives, whichever women in his flock struck his fancy. This was later to prove his undoing, but not until he committed the ultimate act of sadism-one perhaps unparalleled in the literature. After fleeing Ohio after killing the Averys, Jeff and some of his members camped in Missouri. He had by this time taken a second wife, Kathryn, who was already married to one of his followers. Prettier than Jeff's dowdy wife, Alice, and already pregnant by him, she aroused Alice's jealousy to the point of Alice having a nervous breakdown. She made a suicide gesture with some pills washed down with beer. Jeff's punishment for Alice's intolerance of the new wife: he forced Alice to rub his feces around his genitals and then to perform oral sex, swallowing some of the feces in the process.39 Ironically, Lundgren was executed in October of 2006 for murdering the Averys, not for the crime of subjecting a fully conscious person, his own wife, to that degradation40-to many people's way of thinking a worse crime. The authors of his biography mention that Jeff could not have killed the Averys without the cooperation of his followers, but as prosecutor Ken LaTourette said at the trial, none was as "completely evil as Jeff. "41 Further on, in their commentary on the death penalty meted out to Lundgren, the authors wrote five years before his execution: "Jeff Lundgren has never shown any evidence of a broken heart or a contrite spirit. More, he is dangerous, and he is evil, and no civilized society that is obliged to protect itself from evil should allow him to survive. "42

  PSYCHOPATHY AND SPOUSAL MURDER

  The spousal murders we have looked at so far were mostly done on impulse. The main actors in the dramas were often jealous partners, battered wives, and the like. But the malice aforethought and too-clever planning that so readily strike the public as "evil" are more apt to be seen in husbands or wives with prominent psychopathic traits. Sometimes the plot is so bizarre that horror author Stephen King wouldn't touch it ... only it isn't a novel, it's real. The murders are often staged with such inventiveness, originality, and care that the police (so the killer thinks) will never even figure out that there was a murder, let alone put their finger on the "who" of the "whodunit." Until they do. Here are two examples.

  Richard Crafts

  In the fall of 1986, Helle Helsner Crafts-a former Danish stewardess, then married to an American pilot and the mother of their three children-went missing. Her husband, Richard Crafts, at age fifty a good bit older than Helle, had begun to have a series of affairs. Helle was making serious plans to divorce him. Her friends began to worry when Richard told them different stories (she went to Denmark; she went to Africa), and he was known for his aggressiveness. Helle had told her friends, "If something happens to me, don't think it was an accident."43 Someone eventually notified the police that on the last night Helle was seen, a man had been spotted with a wood chipper, standing on a bridge over a lake in Connecticut. Other facts came to light: Richard had, in the recent days, rented not only the wood chipper (used to reduce logs to tiny fragments) but also a chain saw and a freezer. Little by little the police were able to piece together (the emphasis being on "piece") the whole story. By the lake they were able to find pieces of human hair (of Helle's blonde shade), fingernails, and tooth fragments, along with some blood of her (admittedly common) type, "0." Crafts had presumably bludgeoned his wife with a blunt instrument, severed her body into manageable pieces with the chain saw, frozen them until hard in the freezer, and then transported them to the lake-there to be reduced to little pieces by the rented wood chipper. Helle would thus disappear, and Crafts could circumvent the law, according to the maxim "no body, no problem." The tooth fragments, however, matched Helle's dental records. Crafts's first trial ended in a hung jury, but at the second he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

  Susan Grund

  Violence begets violence, which may be part of the reason for the acts perpetrated by Susan Grund. Sue Ann, before she changed her name to a classier-sounding Susan, was from a large, blue-collar family in Indiana. Her alcoholic father was said to have beaten her almost to death when he was drunk, leaving her with scars. She grew up to be a domineering, seductive, embittered woman with no remorse for the cruel things she did to others in her turn. Acquaintances spoke of her as being manipula tive and a habitual liar as well. She married four times altogether, becoming Susan Sanders Lovell Campbell Whited Grund. The first marriage was when she was seventeen. Three years later, she married Gary Campbell by whom she had a son, Jacob. She stole money from Gary and stabbed him with a scissors during sex. She struck Jacob furiously, injuring him. She cheated on Gary with Tom Whited, whom she later married and who had a son, Tommy, by a prior marriage. Susan once beat Tommy so hard for not obeying her "command" that he throw away a certain toy that he developed a blood clot on the brain, which left him permanently retarded and unable to care for himself. On another occasion she left Tommy tied to a stake in hot weather till he got a severe burn; another time she gave him a burn directly-with a cigarette against his leg. For those cruelties she was given a mere fi
ve-year suspended sentence. Not surprisingly, Tom divorced her, though she was then pregnant with his child-a daughter, Tanelle, who was born when Susan was now living alone and penniless.

  Not one to stay down for long, she returned to her family's home in northern Indiana, dressed in her customary see-through, slinky attire, where she attracted the attention of a lawyer, Jim Grund. She was still only twenty-five. Grund had a teenage son, David, by his first wife. Socially, this was a big step up for Susan, who nevertheless cheated on her new husband with his accountant. Greed was as important to her as adventure; at one point, she was strongly suspected of having burned down a boutique Jim had set her up in and for which she collected insurance money. She staged a break-in of their home and received another hefty sum from the insurance company. By the 1990s, she appears to have begun an affair with her stepson (denied by him in court but attested to by others). In the summer of 1992, Jim was murdered in his bed with a gunshot to the eye-from a gun that belonged to his son. Susan acknowledged to one of her sisters, Darlene, that she killed Jim, though even Darlene felt uncertain, since, as she said in court, she didn't know whether to believe her sister Susan: "She's always been a liar." Susan was sentenced to forty-four years in prison (plus twenty more for aggravating circumstances). Her restlessness in trading sex for status seemed never to have abated: rumor had it among the people in her town that Susan had had her eye on a certain senator, who would have represented a still higher rung on the social ladder than the one to which she had already ascended. As is the norm in spousal murder, Susan continues to profess her innocence.` Like many of the persons featured in this chapter, Susan Grund belongs in Category 16. After I learned of Jeff Lundgren's torture and degradation of his wife, I felt, because of the extreme degree of suffering he inflicted on her, the more appropriate category for him was 22.

  STRANGER MURDER-BY A WOMAN

  When women murder, the victim is usually someone close to them: a child, a parent, a lover, or a spouse, occasionally a rival. The killing of a stranger, especially the serial killing of one victim after another with intervals of time in between, is almost entirely a male preserve. But there are exceptions. Some of the exceptions are women who work as accomplices with a man, as in the Bonnie and Clyde bank robber team, or (rarer still) women who act as lures for men committing serial sexual homicide. We will meet a few of these women in the next chapter. In the meantime, here is a woman who became a serial killer of strangers, all by herself.

  Dorothy Puente

  Born Dorothea Helen Gray, she eventually became Dorothy Helen Gray McFaul Johannson Puente Montalvo, but she settled for using the name of her third husband, Puente. In 1929 she was brought into the worldone would hesitate to say "raised"-by one Trudie Yates, an alcoholic and abusive prostitute who put Dorothy in an orphanage with two of the younger of her five siblings. Dorothy was four at the time, her father having died shortly before. In the orphanage she was molested by some of the men there; later, by an older brother. To get away from this unhealthy environment, she married at sixteen to a man named McFaul, having run away from school and turned to prostitution. She soon had two daughters, whom she abandoned. At eighteen she was arrested for theft, but skipped parole, meanwhile inventing fantastical names and occupations-claiming to be a nurse, a doctor, even a surgeon. Marrying again at twenty-three, she emerged as a psychopath with a gift for lying and self-promotion; in a word, a world-class con artist. She set up a rooming house in Sacramento for elderly recipients of Social Security checks-many of which mysteriously ended up in Dorothy's bank account. Her skills failing her temporarily, she did a three-year stint in a California prison for stealing some three dozen checks from her tenants. Some suspected her of homicide as well, but this was not proven. Her downfall came as she neared sixty, when in 1988 a concerned social worker, unable to locate a chronically ill man she'd placed with Puente, suspected foul play. Police eventually checked out the grounds around the rooming house and turned up a human leg bone in the backyard, followed by the remains of seven bodies. It was then discovered that another twenty-five of her boarders were then shown to have gone missing. It turned out Dorothy had killed them with overdoses of sedatives, and then continued to cash their welfare checks. Her sweet-old-lady facade still served her to some advantage: at her trial the jury was hung on the issue of the death penalty, so she was given a life term instead.

  The lives of Susan Grund and Dorothy Puente have much in common. Both married early to escape bad homes. Both had four husbands. Both seem like female versions of the mythical Sweeney Todd. In the story, Todd was born in the worst slums of London, left to survive by his wits when barely in his teens, jailed for theft, befriended by a barber there who taught him the barber's trade when they're released. Todd then seeks to satisfy his greed and take revenge upon more fortunate persons through clever murders for which he is not caught until after many years later. Grund and Puente were born into deplorable circumstances-bad enough to nudge them toward "secondary" psychopathy (based, as far as one can tell, mostly on an adverse environment, that is, rather than on genetic factors). They both personified a combination of greed and revenge in a life dedicated to doing anything to get ahead and to "show them" (all those who had hurt them early on), even if it took murder.

  TERRORISM

  In times of war or group conflict, terrorism usually refers to techniques used by the (militarily) weak to stand up against the strong. Suicide bombers are an example. In peacetime the situation is often reversed: a bully uses violence and intimidation to force the weak to do his will. Rape comes under this heading, though we ordinarily reserve the word terrorism for cases where threats and violence are used repeatedly and where more than just one person is affected. One of the most widely publicized examples of terrorism-one man terrorizing a whole town-took place in the same tiny town where, a quarter century later and only a few blocks away, another crime made national headlines.45 That crime was the murder of Bobbi Jo Stinnett by Lisa Montgomery (mentioned in chapter 3) in her attempt to steal Bobbie Jo's near-term fetus. The town is Skidmore in northwest Missouri; the terrorist was Ken McElroy.

  Ken McElroy

  Said to have been the fifteenth of sixteen children from a two-room farm family near the meeting point of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, McElroy had little schooling but great talent for activities across the whole spectrum of crime. He rustled livestock and was arrested numerous times for theft, assault and battery, stalking, arson, pedophilia, rape, and intimidation; later on, for attempted murder. He made fast friends with a lawyer who matched Ken's talent for crime, in twisting the legal system to get Ken off the hook, no matter the offense. Although he earned a reputation for evil among the townspeople for harassment, robbery, and assault, Ken nevertheless professed to love children. But his "love" was decidedly morbid. He craved sex with pubescent girls and married and raped a total of six young girls over the years, one of whom was only thirteen. Her parents (not to mention the laws of Missouri) understandably disapproved of that union, but Ken shot their dog, burned their house down, and forced their consent-a move that also made it impossible for his new wife to testify against him in the rape charge. McElroy seemed fond of the ten children that four of the girls bore him, but he beat all six wives and "de factos" literally into submission, many of whom stood by him no matter what he did, possibly because of the "Stockholm Syndrome," where the abused begin to identify with and show loyalty to their abusers. If anyone dared challenge him, Ken might drive past that person's house over and over, brandishing a rifle-combining stalking and intimidation in one maneuver.46

  Having beaten twenty-two arrests, thanks to his well-paid lawyer, McElroy became an invincible tyrant, the despotic king of all he surveyed. Until, that is, some of Ken's children stopped in the grocery store owned by Bo and Lois Bowenkamp to buy candy. One began to walk out with some candy that hadn't been paid for. A clerk yelled at the girl, and her older sister took the candy and tossed it back to the store. Another older sister go
t wind of what happened, and shouted, "Nobody accuses my little sister of stealing!" Ken learned of the dispute and, enraged that anyone should cast aspersions on his daughter (even though no one actually had), fired at Bo Bowenkamp a few days later with a sawed-off shotgun. The owner survived, but the town had had enough-especially when the timid police and judge ordered Ken released for the attempted murder "pending an appeal." The next time Ken showed up in townJuly 10, 1981-several of the citizens shot him to death as he sat in his car. Though some decried the vigilantism that substituted for the law in Skidmore-a lesser evil that put paid to a greater evil-no one talked, nor was anyone ever prosecuted.41

  Chapter Seven

  SERIAL KILLERS

  AND TORTURERS

  Canto XXXII, 11. 133-35

  "0 you who show by such a bestial sign hatred over him you are eating, tell me why," I said ...

  "0 to the mostri per si bestial segno odio sovra colui the to ti mangi dimmi `1 perch&," diss' io ...

  ost of the persons described in the last chapter belong to Category 16 on the Gradations of Evil scale; a few, however, to levels a few steps below. In the case of Jeff Lundgren, his public acts (the murder of the Avery family) were consistent with that level, yet his private acts (the degradation of his wife in the most repugnant fashion) belonged to the worst level: 22, reserved for murders involving prolonged torture. Lundgren is one of those people who does not fit neatly into just one pigeonhole. Many of the acts the public is least hesitant about condemning as evil do not involve murder at all, as it turns out. We saw this with Lundgren and, ironically, even with Dale Pierre-two of whose victims managed, I suspect somewhat to their regret, to survive their suffering. By surviving, their suffering-both physical and psychologicalextended for days and years beyond the few minutes after they were compelled at gunpoint to swallow the Drano. Here we will confront the extremes: the serial killers (including those who seemingly made a profession out of torture), along with a few individuals whose physical torture of their victims was never meant to have ended in their death. To begin, we need to clarify what is meant by the phrase "serial killer."