Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  Herbert Mullin, whose case is described in the next chapter (see the “Visionary” section), is also a classic case study of the disorganized class of serial killer, as is Richard Chase, described in Chapter 9.

  The Mixed-Category Serial Killer: Richard Ramirez—The “Night Stalker”

  Richard Ramirez, who committed most of his crimes in Los Angeles, is an example of a mixed-category murderer. Between June 1984 and August 1985, nineteen people were brutally killed inside their homes by a mysterious intruder who was dubbed the “Night Stalker” by the press. Men were shot or strangled, while women were brutally raped and mutilated. He gouged out one victim’s eyes with a spoon and took them away with him. One night, he killed three victims, on other nights, he left without killing his victims. At the crime scenes, the Night Stalker left occult symbols such as an inverted pentagram drawn on a wall with a victim’s lipstick. Some crime scenes were signed “Jack the Knife.” One victim who survived reported that as she was being raped, he forced her to recite, “I love Satan.” When asked where they hid their valuables, victims were ordered to “swear on Satan” that they were telling the truth. The crimes were committed completely at random, and the killer made unsuccessful attempts to disguise his fingerprints. His victims often saw his face, and he left them alive as often as he killed them. Outside the windows of the houses he entered, he left behind his shoe prints. When the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit was asked to profile the crime scenes, they responded that the crimes were unique and did not conform to anything they had seen before.

  In 1985 California installed a new $25 million computer system—Cal-ID—that could automatically search out fingerprints from previous crimes and match them to prints on record. The official story is that within several minutes of being online, the computer used the prints left behind by the Night Stalker to identify him as Richard Ramirez, a twenty-five-year-old petty burglar from El Paso, Texas. The real story is that police had first developed leads from several street informants who dealt in stolen goods. They revealed that a burglar they knew named Rick, Ricardo, or Richard Ramirez was weird enough to be the Night Stalker. Police ran those names through the computer and quickly came up with a match on a fingerprint from an abandoned car connected to one of the crimes.97

  Pictures of Ramirez were widely publicized in California, and it was not long before he was sighted on a street in a residential Los Angeles neighborhood. The police had to rescue him from a mob intent on beating him to death.

  Richard Ramirez was a mentally disturbed drifter with a cocaine addiction who frequented the skid row district around the Los Angeles bus station. He was the youngest brother in a devout Catholic Mexican family. Ramirez’s father was a former Mexican police officer and a domineering and tyrannical parent whose temper frightened all the kids. His mother was deeply religious, frequently praying, lighting candles, and regularly attending church.

  We will later see that frequently serial killers sustained head injuries as children; Ramirez was accidentally knocked unconscious twice as a child. He also had epileptic seizures. When Ramirez was seven or eight he might have witnessed his older brothers being sexually molested by a neighbor. Neither he nor his brothers can remember whether Ramirez himself was victimized. Ramirez is remembered as shy and sweet, and his teenage girlfriend with whom he had a relationship several years before the murders also remembers him as a gentle and sweet lover. Girls at his school remember Ramirez as being “nice.”

  When Ramirez was twelve years old he began to hang out with his cousin Mike, a Green Beret who had recently returned from two tours of duty in Vietnam. They frequently smoked marijuana together, and Mike regaled the impressionable Richard with war stories. According to Ramirez, his cousin showed him black-and-white Polaroids of Vietnamese women forced to perform fellatio on soldiers. Other photographs showed the severed heads of the same women. Ramirez said that he became highly aroused at the sight of those images. On May 4, 1974, while on a visit at Mike’s house, Richard saw his cousin shoot his wife to death in cold blood. Mike told him never to say that he had been there and sent him home. Ramirez remained mute about what he had seen, while Mike was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental facility.

  Several days after the shooting, Richard visited the apartment with his parents to retrieve some of Mike’s property. Ramirez recently recalled: “That day I went back to that apartment, it was like some kind of mystical experience. It was all quiet and still and hot in there. You could smell the blood.”

  After witnessing the homicide, Richard began to steal and habitually smoke marijuana. His interest in school declined. Making matters worse, he went to Los Angeles to visit his older brother, a heroin-addicted thief who instructed Richard on the finer arts of burglary.

  When he was thirteen, Richard moved away from home to live with another brother. There he began experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, mushrooms, and PCP—angel dust—a highly unstable and dangerous drug normally used as a horse tranquilizer. Richard became obsessed with slasher horror films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th. He was into heavy metal, especially the darker stuff from Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Billy Idol, Ozzy Osborne, and AC/DC. Soon he dropped out of school.

  In 1978 Richard left El Paso and returned to live in Los Angeles, settling into the cheap seedy hotels in the downtown tenderloin district. He became addicted to cocaine, which he would inject. In summary, Ramirez had head injuries, had epilepsy, had a tyrannical father and an overly religious mother, was perhaps sexually molested, was exposed to graphically violent images, witnessed a murder at age twelve in which he was complicit by his silence, smoked marijuana, consumed LSD and PCP, and entertained himself by watching horror films and listening to heavy metal, before he became addicted to the ultimate paranoia-inducing drug—cocaine, which he did not merely snort, but injected. Young Richard’s brain no doubt was seriously fried and his soul battered when he added one more thing into the mix at age seventeen: In the summer of 1978 he read The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey—a San Francisco self-styled satanist. So impressed was Richard that he stole a car and drove to San Francisco, where he sought out LaVey and attended his satanic rituals, during which he says he felt the hand of Satan touch him.

  Between 1978 and 1984 Ramirez became almost entirely estranged from his family, including his brothers. He rarely contacted them and we know little about his activities. In mid-1983 his sister sought him out and found him living in a fleabag hotel near the L.A. bus station. He was still injecting cocaine and sustaining himself by committing burglaries. He told his sister that Satan was protecting him from arrest.

  On June 27, 1984, he committed his first known murder, stabbing a woman to death as she slept in her bed. He would kill at least nineteen victims, raping, stabbing, shooting, mutilating, and bludgeoning them, before his capture on August 31, 1985.

  At his trial Ramirez flashed press photographers with an inverted pentagram inked on his palm and chanted “Evil, evil . . .” When he was convicted and sentenced to death, he growled at the court, “I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society . . . I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards; truly trematodes of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession. . . . You maggots make me sick; hypocrites one and all . . . And no one knows that better than those who kill for policy, clandestinely or openly, as do the governments of the world, which kill in the name of god and country or for whatever reason they deem appropriate . . . I don’t need to hear all of society’s rationalizations. I’ve heard them all before and the fact remains that what is, is. You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it . . . I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil, legions of the night—night breed—repeat not the errors of the Night Stalker and show no mercy . . . I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of us! . . . See you in Disneyland.”

  We can see tha
t Ramirez fits both categories of organized and disorganized serial killers. He killed his victims in their homes at random, not always sure whom he would find when he entered houses. He overcame them with a fast “blitz”-type attack using extreme force. He left many of his victims alive, suggesting that when he made a decision to kill he made it spontaneously at the scene. He did not disguise his face and left forensic evidence behind, traits of a disorganized killer. On the other hand, Ramirez brought weapons to the scene and even carried a police frequency scanner, traits of an organized offender. Ramirez is a mixed-category serial killer in the FBI system.

  In Chapter 9, which deals with profiling, we will return to a more extensive discussion of some of the problems of the organized/disorganized profiling system used by the FBI. Next, however, we explore how the dissatisfaction with the organized/disorganized model of serial killer behavior led to the evolution of alternate and more complex categories.

  Demo version limitation

  FIVE

  THE QUESTION OF MADNESS:

  Inside Their Heads

  The biggest mistake in trying to figure out why these people are this way is that we try to analyze them through our own standard of behavior.

  They don’t think the way you or I think. We’re not sure why—but the point is they don’t.

  —JIM WRIGHT, FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit

  When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Few would disagree that Herbert Mullin, who thought he was saving California from the great earthquake by killing people, and Ed Gein, who was making chairs out of human skin, were entirely insane when they committed their acts. The question becomes more difficult with somebody like law student Ted Bundy, who killed twenty women while at the same time working as a suicide prevention counselor, or John Wayne Gacy, who escorted the first lady and then went home to sleep over thirty-three trussed-up corpses under his house. On one hand their crimes seem “insane,” yet on the other hand, Bundy and Gacy knew exactly what they were doing. How insane were they?

  The Insanity Plea

  Part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of insanity—doctors define insanity differently from courts of law. The insanity plea has existed in English jurisprudence since the reign of Henry III (1216–1272), when the king could commute a death sentence of an insane criminal if it was demonstrated that irrational behavior was not unusual for the person in the past. In such cases, the prisoner would often end up being confined in a monastery. In the next century the plea was moved into the regular appeals process, no longer requiring the king’s authority. In 1581 legal authorities were arguing what a test of insanity should consist of in law, settling upon “knowledge of good and evil” as the test.134

  In 1843, English jurisprudence developed the concept of insanity as a defense against charges of murder. A mentally ill man named Daniel M’Naghten came to believe that he was personally being threatened by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and mistakenly shot and killed Peel’s private secretary. He was acquitted on the grounds of insanity in what is known to this day as the M’Naghten rule. It is used in many Western countries today, including the United States, to define insanity in the courts. It states that to establish a successful defense on the ground of insanity:

  It must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.135

  In other words, to claim insanity, a defendant needs to prove that he could not distinguish between right and wrong, or that he was not aware of what he was doing, because of mental illness.

  In 1887, U.S. judges expanded the test for an insanity plea. They felt that while the M’Naghten rule excused those who could not tell right from wrong, it did not excuse those who knew they were doing wrong but could not resist the impulse to do so because of mental incapacity. Ruling in State of Alabama v. Parsons, the judges stated:

  If, by reason of duress of such mental disease, he had so far lost the power to choose between the right and wrong, and to avoid doing the act in question, as that his free agency was at the time destroyed.136

  In 1954, American courts further broadened the ground for a plea of insanity in Durham v. United States: “An accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.”137This broad decision was codified by the acceptance of American courts in 1962 of a test proposed by the American Law Institute:

  A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law. The terms “mental disease or defect” do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise anti social conduct.138

  Between 1955 and 1984, every trial where this defense was used required the conflicting testimony of psychiatrists who frequently disagreed on an exact definition of “mental incapacity” and its effect on an “irresistible impulse” of a defendant. Defense lawyers for serial killers who were lucid, cleverly concealed their crimes, and functioned in their daily lives argued that they were not guilty by reason of insanity—that they could not resist the impulse to kill, even though they knew it was wrong, because they were sick.

  This broad definition of legal insanity came crashing down between Dan White’s so-called “Twinkie Defense”* in the murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978 and John Hinckley’s acquittal by reason of insanity for his attempt to gun down President Ronald Reagan. In October 1984 Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act, which returned the insanity pleas in federal courts closer to the original M’Naghten definition and set a model for state courts as well:

  At the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense.

  The inability to resist an impulse to kill, for whatever reason, is no longer a viable defense for a serial killer. Most serial killers do not fit the legal definition of insanity, especially the organized ones. They search for and stalk their victims, they arrive with weapons and restraints prepared, they take their time killing, and they destroy the evidence afterward, demonstrating a full knowledge of the consequences of their crime. They elude detection and therefore are obviously aware of the wrongfulness of their act.

  This was clearly hammered home with the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1992, who was charged in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with the murders of fifteen men and boys. He kept some of their body parts in his fridge, occasionally eating them. He constructed altars from their skulls while reducing the remains of their corpses in drums of acid stored in his bedroom. He attempted to transform several of his still-living victims into sex zombies by drilling through their skulls and injecting their brains with battery acid. One would think, if that’s not crazy, then what the hell is? And that is precisely the argument his attorney attempted to present. It did not work.

  So what is wrong with these guys? Obviously something makes them different from the rest of us. Describing them as merely evil seems too simplistic and unscientific—after all, what is “evil” exactly? Psychologists over the last decade have been desperately attempting to evolve clinical definitions and explanations for the deeds and personalities of serial killers.

  Psychotics and Psychopaths

  The two concepts most often associated with serial killers by the public, press, law enforcement, and academia are psychotic and psychopath. The two terms have very different meanings.

  A psychotic is someone who has psychosis, a deb
ilitating organic mental illness, still not entirely understood, that can result in delusions, hallucinations, and radical changes of behavior. Individuals with this disorder are rarely violent, and very few serial killers are diagnosed as psychotic. In a study of 2,000 people arrested for murder between 1964 and 1973, only 1 percent were found to be psychotic.139 The psychotic’s incapacitating disconnection with reality rarely makes him a good candidate for a long career as a serial killer. Psychotics who display violence most often direct it at themselves.

  On the other hand, serial killers are most often diagnosed as psychopaths, or another closely related term, sociopath. A psychopath is profoundly different from a psychotic. The psychopathic state is not so much a mental illness as a behavioral or personality disorder. One forensic psychiatrist described it as follows:

  A morality that is not operating by any recognized or accepted moral code, but operating entirely according to expediency to what one feels like doing at the moment or that which will give the individual the most gratification or pleasure.140