Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  That was the end of Cottingham. For his crimes in New Jersey, he received several terms ranging from sixty to ninety-five years, a term of twenty-five years to life, and another term to run consecutively of a minimum of thirty years. And then he was extradited to New York to stand trial for the “torso” homicides there. We won’t be seeing Richard again.

  Cottingham denied committing any of the murders to the bitter end, despite the fact that some of the victims’ property was found in his home and his fingerprint was found on the handcuffs restraining one of the victims. The only thing Cottingham admitted was, “I have a problem with women.”

  My brief run-in with Cottingham was a hell of a story and I told it for a long time, long after had I met, but did not know it, yet another serial killer—one for the record books, the Ukrainian cannibal Andrei Chikatilo, who killed and mutilated an extraordinary fifty-three victims in the Soviet Union.

  In 1990 I was making television documentaries, and in October of that year I found myself in Moscow making a film about the changes taking place there under Gorbachev. One day we came upon an extraordinary sight. A tent city with about five hundred people had been spontaneously erected on the front lawn of a hotel immediately behind the Red Square beneath the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The residents seemed to have come in from all parts of the country and were mostly aged pensioners protesting Stalinist abuses of the past. They had bizarre placards attached to their tents and shelters. Some pasted to their foreheads little slips of paper with protests with strange things written in broken archaic English, such as “Lenin is bonehead.” Others held up placards with elaborately laid-out documents, letters, and photographs documenting their complaints. I waded into the crowd with my crew and started speaking with some of the people, seeking out possible interviews to film. It seemed that almost everybody there was somehow traumatized and mentally ill, and considering what had happened to them during the Stalin era, it was understandable.

  At some point I spotted a small stand decorated with the white, blue, and red of the old Imperial Russian tricolor flag. In 1990 it was still a rare thing to see those colors in the USSR. It belonged to a gaunt man with graying hair and big glasses. His other features I cannot recall, other than his being closely shaved and dressed relatively well (for the USSR) in a mid-length jacket, clean shirt, and neatly knotted tie. He looked to be maybe in his late forties or early fifties and stood out with his neat dress and younger age when compared to the many raggedy-scruffy bearded Russian pensioners occupying the tent city around him. There was something refined about him—perhaps delicate or prissy. Next to him was a typical battered leather briefcase like those that almost every Soviet bureaucrat and office worker carried.

  He introduced himself, but later I forgot his name and where he said he came from. At first he spoke quietly, calmly, and in a highly educated manner. The few phrases he attempted in English were well pronounced and grammatical. He reminded me of a librarian. He explained that he held several university degrees and was “not like” the rest of the rabble around him. As his story began to pour out, he gradually was overcome with emotion; his eyes welled up with tears and his glasses actually fogged up. But his story was so absurd that I would never forget it: He was here in Moscow, he told me, to see Gorbachev to complain that somebody was building an illegal garage and toilet beneath the windows of his son’s apartment. It was a conspiracy, he wailed.

  I had just interviewed an old woman a few rows away who had told me she was dying of cancer and fifty years earlier had been arrested and put in the gulag while her children were sent to a state institution. She had not seen them since and was desperate to find them before she died, but the authorities were not helping. This neatly dressed man’s prissy complaints about some garage seemed to me petty and stupid in comparison—and worse: boring television. Searching for somebody else to interview, I drifted away from him as fast as I politely could, not even listening to the last few things he had to say, and quickly forgot all about him. That is how I missed filming an interview with Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo—the Red Ripper—“Citizen X”—three weeks before his capture—one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history.

  While Cottingham I remembered, I forgot everything about Chikatilo other than the neatness of his dress and the banality of his complaint. I do not remember his eyes, other than the tears in them and the fogged veil of the lenses in his glasses; nothing of his face other than it was clean shaven. He remains but a softly spoken shadowy politeness in my memory—but in my nightmares, he stills comes to me as a monstrous geek with eyeless sockets spewing tears.

  Within days of my brief conversation with him in Moscow, he would return to his home in Rostov in the Ukraine to kill his fifty-first known victim. Riding on a local train, he convinced a sixteen-year-old mentally handicapped boy to accompany him to his “cottage” with the promise that there were girls there. The two got off the train and Chikatilo walked the boy into a dense wood, where he suddenly forced him to the ground and ripped off his trousers. He tied the boy with a rope that he carried with him in his briefcase just for that kind of occasion and then rolled him over and removed the rest of his clothes. (Was it the same briefcase I saw that day in the tent city?) He molested him and then bit off the tip of the boy’s tongue and stabbed him repeatedly in the head and stomach. Afterward he cut off the boy’s genitals and threw them into the bushes. After dragging the body into some thick undergrowth he recovered the rope and wiped the blood off himself and his knife with the boy’s clothes. He straightened out his own clothing (and was it the same shirt and tie I saw him in?) and then calmly returned to the nearby railway station and took the train home.

  Ten days later at a different railway station, Chikatilo killed another sixteen-year-old boy, mutilating him in a similar fashion, his fifty-second victim. A week later, behind the same station where he killed the mentally handicapped youth, he murdered his fifty-third and final victim, a twenty-two-year-old woman. He cut off the tip of her tongue and both her nipples after mutilating her genitals. After he emerged from the bush with blood smeared on his face, he was washing up at a platform water tap when a police officer, on the lookout for a killer, briefly questioned Chikatilo and recorded his identification. He was allowed to continue on his way—the police officer later stated that he had no way of determining that the smear on Chikatilo’s face was actually blood. Gorbachev’s new rules strictly regulated police conduct toward citizens—everything was to be done by the book now. The police officer let Chikatilo go, but for the next few days he was put under surveillance. When the body of the female victim was eventually discovered near the station where he was questioned, Chikatilo was immediately picked up.

  The following year I watched the Chikatilo trial on Russian television and saw photographs of him. Chikatilo had killed women, girls, boys, and youths indiscriminately, almost always luring them either to a killing shack he kept in a seedy part of town or to isolated fields or woods. He used his refined and educated persona to seduce his victims into trusting him. Often preying on the destitute, the mentally handicapped, the lost, and the young, he offered food, sex, shelter, or directions to entice his victims to accompany him to their deaths. Once he had his victims isolated, he would brutally attack and mutilate them using a “killing kit” of various knives and sharp instruments he carried with him in his briefcase.

  By the time the trial began, Chikatilo’s head was shaved and he appeared quite mad, howling at the courtroom spectators from within a specially built cage. But even seeing the earlier photographs of him in the press, I never recognized him from that day I met him in the Moscow tent city. I still occasionally told my Richard Cottingham story, never realizing what punch-line lurked beyond it. It was only years later that I came across a transcript of Chikatilo’s police interrogation in which he complained about the conspiratorial attempt to build a garage and toilet behind his son’s apartment and his intention to meet with Gorbachev in Moscow. I was transfixed in
horror—could it possibly be the same guy? It had to be—the story was just too eccentric, and even the Russian investigator remarked on Chikatilo’s emotional peaks when he began to speak of the garage. Indeed, after some further research I uncovered an account of Chikatilo’s visit to Moscow in October 1990 just before he committed his last three murders.2

  I came to realize that in my life I had met not one, but two serial killers—unidentified and out there killing—and for the longest time I had not even known it. How many more could there be? And where the hell were they coming from?

  I was puzzled by the conventional backgrounds of these two killers—both gainfully employed family men: Cottingham, a New York City computer operator with a house and three kids in the suburbs; and Chikatilo, a university-educated schoolteacher, father of two children, writer of political essays for Soviet publications, and, later, factory materials purchaser. These two were not grizzled glassy-eyed drifters or twitchy recluses—types we frequently associate with serial killers. They were ordinary.

  Most of all, I was fascinated with their invisibility—their forgettability. Apparently they stalked and killed like evil transparent ghosts. Even when I had run into Cottingham, presumably carrying two severed heads and having just set fire to a hotel I was checking into, I would forget him within seconds of the encounter. Cottingham was so forgettable that after leaving behind a mutilated corpse under a motel bed, he checked back into the very same motel a mere eighteen days later, and nobody recognized him.

  Of Chikatilo himself, I still have no memory—just that of his ridiculous story and fragmentary glimpses of the monster: glasses, the knot of his tie, a clean-shaven cheek, a briefcase lying in the grass by his feet—but of him . . . nothing. This invisibility let him kill fifty-three people and almost walk away untouched, with blood on his face, from a police officer looking for him. What manner of ghoulish monsters were these?

  All of this led me to contemplate how Cottingham and Chikatilo came to exist—where had they sprung from and by what means and paths did they move about for me to so randomly stumble across these two homicidal monsters, roaming free in the wild among us?

  In my attempt to map the primordial substance from which they rose, I came to write this book, and in a way, map my own substance as well. Was there something about me that led me to cross their paths? I learned that many victims of serial killers “facilitate” their own deaths by their choice of lifestyle or behavior—hitchhikers, runaways, street hookers. While not a victim, I perhaps facilitated my meeting with Cottingham by my choice of hotels near a hookers’ stroll. I strayed into a serial killer’s hunting grounds as a trespasser and got a bump from a monster.

  While my Cottingham encounter in New York was one of those experiences that one can easily write off as coincidence, my second encounter with a serial killer made me wonder. I questioned the mathematical odds of running into two killers in that manner. One killer I could easily understand, but two made me ask, how many more might there be out there that I did not know about? I wondered what the odds were of walking by a serial killer without ever finding out about it—on the street, waiting in line for burger, browsing for books in a true-crime section, or sitting next to one on a train or bus? I shuddered when I heard somebody explain that serial killers might be strangers—but only to you. They become very familiar with you if they pick you as their target—you are no stranger to them.

  It seemed to me that millions of people move about their daily lives without meeting a serial killer—or at least, without finding out they had met one. Perhaps that is precisely what makes me different from you—that I have uncovered the transparent monsters who had tramped across my path—my serial killers—while you perhaps have not uncovered yours. I pray you never will.

  PART ONE

  A HISTORY OF MONSTERS

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  THREE

  CLASSIFYING SERIAL KILLERS:

  The Typologies of Monstrosity

  I’m the only Ph.D. in serial murder.

  —TED BUNDY

  You could smell the blood.

  —RICHARD RAMIREZ

  They say that the twentieth century is an age of specialization; if that is true, then it certainly applies to serial killers. Each serial killer falls into a specific category and rarely do his murders cross the parameters defining the categories. This kind of categorization has become important in police investigations because it helps identify the probable characteristics of a suspect in a process the police use called criminal profiling. (See Chapter 9 for a more detailed treatment on profiling and some of the controversies surrounding it.)

  There is no single universally accepted system for categorizing serial killers. It varies depending upon the individual investigator, criminologist, or forensic psychologist who is proposing the categories. In the next two chapters we will explore some of the more frequently cited categories used in classifying serial killers.

  Probably the most common and familiar is the FBI’s organized/disorganized classifications. The FBI’s behavioral specialists have compiled the Crime Classification Manual, which categorizes murder into four main groups: criminal enterprise homicide (category 100); personal cause homicide (category 120); sexual homicide (category 130); and group cause homicide (category 140). These groups are then further divided up into some forty subcategories. Thus, for example, under personal cause homicide, category 122.01 is spontaneous domestic homicide while category 123.01 is argument murder. Category 101 under criminal enterprise homicide is contract killing while category 107 is insurance inheritance-related death.85

  There is no separate category for serial killing; serial homicides fall into the various categories depending upon their type. The most common group where serial homicides frequently occur is category 130: sexual homicide. That group is divided into subcategories that include the following:

  131: organized sexual homicide

  132: disorganized sexual homicide

  133: mixed sexual homicide

  Thus a singular or serial sex killer will be first categorized as organized, disorganized or mixed. These three categories are the fundamental building blocks of serial killer identification and profiling used by the FBI and by police agencies that adopt the FBI system.

  Organized Killers

  The organized offender plans his murders and his escape carefully. He thinks through his crimes, often for weeks, months, and even years, before acting. He evolves his fantasy gradually and is aware of his growing compulsion to act out his murderous desire. He scrupulously targets his victims and stalks them for as long as necessary. He gains control over them at the crime scene. Often he takes his victims to another location and disposes of the body in such a manner that it may never be found. The killer is methodical and orderly in his crime. There are usually three separate crime scenes: where the victim was confronted, where the victim was killed, and where the victim’s body was disposed of.

  The organized serial killer is dangerous and difficult to track for the police. Usually he is socially competent and gainfully employed as a skilled worker. He approaches his victims by socializing with them, charming them, or tricking them into a situation where he can overpower them. He owns a car and is mobile, often is married or lives with a partner, and is sometimes the father of children. He follows the reports of his crimes in the media and may change jobs or move to a different city to avoid being detected. He is intelligent, often educated, cunning, and controlled. He brings his own weapons and restraints such as rope, handcuffs, or tape to the scene of the crime, and afterward he destroys evidence left behind. He is sometimes schooled in police investigative methods. The organized serial killer is a perfectionist, constantly improving his technique with each additional murder. The longer he kills, the more difficult he becomes to capture.

  Disorganized Killers

  The disorganized serial killer is diametrically opposite the organized one. He too is difficult to cat
ch because while the organized killer is predictable in a certain way, the disorganized one is not. The police cannot second-guess the disorganized offender because he himself does not make any careful plans and does not know when he will kill next. He has vague and intense murderous fantasies, but he does not develop a thought-out plan of action. The disorganized serial killer usually attacks his victims spontaneously—his act is often a crime of opportunity. The victim is frequently overcome by a violent “blitz” attack and the weapon is often an object found near by—a pipe, a rock, a branch. The killer is usually socially inept, is unemployed or unskilled, does not own a car, and kills near his home. He is often of below-average intelligence or psychotic. The victim’s body is usually left where the confrontation and attack took place, and the killer makes no attempt to hide it. The corpse is often subjected to extraordinary and frenzied mutilation. The offender often keeps souvenirs from the victim’s belongings, clothes, and even parts of the victim’s body. He makes little or no effort to cover his tracks, destroy evidence, disguise himself, or develop an escape plan. Often the offender is isolated from other people and living alone, and therefore, there is nobody from whom to hide incriminating objects or behavior. Evidence might be found in his premises out in the open or even on display.