Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  Psychologist S. K. Henderson described psychopaths in his 1939 text as follows:

  The term psychopathic state is the name we apply to those individuals who conform to a certain intellectual standard, sometimes high, sometimes approaching the realm of defect but yet not amounting to it, who throughout their lives, or from a comparatively early age, have exhibited disorders of conduct of an antisocial or asocial nature, usually of a recurrent or episodic type, where, in many instances, have proved difficult to influence by methods of social, penal, and medical care and treatment and for whom we have no adequate provision of a preventive or curative nature. The inadequacy or deviation or failure to adjust to ordinary social life is not a mere willfulness or badness which can be threatened or thrashed out of the individual so involved, but constitutes a true illness for which we have no specific explanation.141

  Psychologists theorize that psychopaths have a diminished capacity to experience fear and anxiety, which are the roots to the normal development of a conscience. Psychopaths are often very charismatic and very able at manipulating people. They are highly talented in feigning emotions while inside feeling nothing. They have no remorse for their victims and have highly developed psychological defense mechanisms such as rationalization (“She should have known better than to hitchhike”), projection (“She was a heartless manipulating slut”), and disassociation (“I don’t remember killing her”). They have a very weak realization of self and compensate for that with grandiosity and an inflated notion of entitlement—meaning that they feel that they are special and “entitled” to act above the law or morality. Most notably, psychopaths lack any sense of empathy with the feelings of others.

  A psychiatric manual lists some of the primary characteristics of the psychopath, many if not all of which can be found in a serial killer: glibness and superficial charm; grandiosity; continuous need for stimulation; pathological lying; conning and manipulative behavior; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect; callous lack of empathy; parasitic lifestyle; poor behavioral controls; promiscuity; early behavior problems; lack of realistic long-term goals; impulsivity; irresponsibility; failure to accept responsibility for actions; many short-term relationships; juvenile delinquency; revocation of conditional release; and criminal versatility.142

  While not all psychopaths are violent, they are prone to violence more than average. It is estimated that 20 to 30 percent of prison populations consist of psychopaths.143 But the same might be said for the populations of corporate CEOs, performing artists, and certainly for politicians. Being a psychopath alone does not make one a serial killer.

  The official psychiatric term for a psychopath is antisocial personality disorder. The diagnostic criteria for this disorder, as described by the standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV), are as follows:

  There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by at least three (or more) of the following:

  failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repreatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest

  deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure

  impulsivity or failure to plan ahead

  irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights and assaults

  reckless disregard for the safety of self or others

  consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations

  lack of remorse, as indicated by indifference to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another

  Individual is at least age 18 years.

  There is evidence of Conduct Disorder with onset before age 15 years.

  The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of a Schizophrenic or Manic Episode.

  Evidence of conduct disorder onset before age fifteen.144

  BIOSOCIAL INTERACTION

  Generally speaking, violent psychopaths emerge out of a combination of personal social conditions and biological and genetic factors. Brain injuries can cause a psychopathic behavioral pattern; many serial killers have a record of head injuries when they were children or recent injuries prior to their beginning to kill. But this is not the cause of their murderous behavior—other behavioral problems are already present. Healthy people who sustain head injuries do not become killers.

  Psychopaths also show abnormal balances of chemicals currently linked to depression and compulsive behavior: monoamine oxidase (MAO) and serotonin. They show cortical underarousal, high CSF free testosterone, and EEG abnormalities.145 A high level of urine kryptopyrrole and an extra Y chromosome have also been suspected as factors in the violent behavior of psychopaths.146

  There is evidence that some type of congenital genetic abnormalities resulting in brain damage may be common to many serial killers. Nineteenth-century criminology tended to promote the idea of a genetic criminal type. This idea has been swept away in the twentieth century by environmental theories. Now criminology is beginning to steer a line somewhere in between the two approaches.

  Forensic psychologist Joel Norris listed twenty-three types of physical characteristics of which three or more would indicate congenital genetic disorders and which he frequently found in serial killers he studied. Some of these characters included malformed ears; curved fifth finger; larger than normal gap between first and second toes; fine or electric wire hair that will not comb down; bulbous fingertips; and a speckled tongue with either smooth or rough spots.147

  The prevailing theory is that there is a delicate balance between a chaotic or abusive childhood and biochemical factors that can trigger murderous psychopathic behavior. Healthy social factors can prevent a biochemically unstable individual from committing criminal acts; healthy biochemistry can protect a person with a turbulent childhood from growing up to be a killer. Violent offenders emerge when both elements are out of balance. This theory goes a long way to explain why some children with difficult childhoods do not become serial killers and not everyone with a head injury behaves criminally.

  CAN PSYCHOPATHS BE TREATED AND CURED?

  The problem with psychopaths is that the disorder is highly elusive—it is not a disease that can been directly traced to a single chemical, viral, or organic agent; it is a mysterious behavioral disorder whose history is buried deep in the offender’s psychology, environment, and biochemistry. It is likely that a cure for cancer will be found before psychopaths can be routinely treated and cured. Numerous serial killers, after committing their first murders and being sent to psychiatric facilities or receiving psychiatric treatment in prison, were deemed “cured” and committed more escalated series of murders after their release. Edmund Kemper, for example, murdered his grandparents at age fifteen and was released after five years to murder seven women, including his mother. (See his case study later in this chapter.) Arthur Shawcross murdered two children in Watertown, New York; served fourteen years with treatment; and then was released in April 1987. By 1990 he had murdered eleven women in the Rochester area and was captured having lunch over a corpse he had dumped several days earlier. Richard Biegenwald was released after serving seventeen years for murder and went on to kill another seven victims before being sent back to prison.

  Most often, however, psychopaths cure themselves as they age. Starting from age twenty-one, approximately 2 percent of all psychopaths go into remission every year.148 The older the psychopath becomes, the more likely that he will become adjusted to society—especially in his midforties. This may account for the relatively young average age of serial killers (midtwenties) and for why some serial killers vanish without being captured or identified.

  Successful treatment of psychopaths, however, is so rare that articles trumpet them in psychiatric journals with a grandeur akin to the discovery of a new pla
net. The International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology in 1999 described a “Marcel” who raped six children and, while in a psychiatric facility, raped an adult male. After undergoing therapy, Marcel has apparently been living a normal life for the last twenty years.149 In 2003, in the same journal, an article described a “Mr. X” who sought out treatment for his fantasies of becoming a serial killer. The article states, however, that Mr. X, while having some similar traits of serial killers, did not show any signs of being a psychopath when tested. The Ohio psychiatrists who treated Mr. X concluded, “This lack of psychopathy may have led him to treatment rather than to carrying out the planned homicides.”150

  Peter Woodcock (David Michael Krueger)—Thirty-Five Years of Therapy

  I have read a lot of case histories in researching this book, but few compare to the story of my own hometown serial killer, Peter Woodcock in Toronto. “Crazier than a shithouse rat” may not be a highly scientific term, but it’s the only one that comes to mind. Few have heard of Peter Woodcock, who committed his first series of crimes in 1956–1957 and escapes mention in all serial killer encyclopedias and lists (which makes me wonder how many other “hometown” serial killers around the world are not catalogued by researchers).

  Woodcock was born March 5, 1939, in Toronto, Canada. It is unclear whether his young mother, Wanita Woodcock, was a seventeen-year-old factory worker or a nineteen-year-old prostitute—the record is conflicted. An adoption was arranged after his mother was allowed to keep him for a month to breast-feed him. Adoption agency records report that already in that first month, Peter showed feeding problems and cried constantly.151

  As an infant he was shunted around numerous foster homes, unable to bond with any of his foster parents. In his first year he cried constantly and slept and ate little. After his first birthday he became terrified of anybody approaching him. He learned to talk but his speech was incoherent, described as strange whining animal noises. He had problems with at least one of the foster placements at around age two—he was treated in an emergency hospital with an injured neck as a result of a beating at the hands of one foster parent.

  Peter was finally placed in a stable home when he was three. His new foster parents—Frank and Susan Maynard—were an upper-middle-class couple who had a son ten years older than Peter. Susan Maynard is said to have been a forceful woman with an exaggerated sense of propriety who became very attached to the weird child who had difficulty walking and still screamed when anyone came near.

  By age five Peter had stopped screaming at the approach of strangers but remained a weird and lonely child. Other children in the neighborhood refused to play with him and he became a target for bullies. Between ages seven and twelve, Woodcock was treated extensively for emotional problems in Toronto’s renowned Hospital for Sick Children.

  His primary problem was a tendency to wander away from home great distances, sometimes staying away several nights. After one search, he was found cowering in some bushes and explained that he was hiding from other children. He killed the family’s pet canary, blaming it on the dog. He tore down window blinds, hacked up his socks, cut his clothing, smashed the radio, and carved crude symbols into the dining room table. He also developed a strange walk in which he would swing his arms forward on the same side he would step forward.

  Woodcock says that when he was seven or eight, his mother underwent a transformation after being pushed down a railway station staircase in an attempted purse snatching. After that, he says, she would beat him with a beaded rod.

  Peter lived in a vivid fantasy world full of obsessions. One of his primary obsessions was Toronto’s streetcar system and he compulsively rode and tracked the various routes. Decades later, while he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and much of Toronto’s streetcar system had been changed or dismantled, Woodcock could still recall from memory the various routes and their schedules.

  Peter was sent to a nearby private school, but the weird child did not do very well there. He made no friends, participated in no games, and remained isolated from other children.

  By age eleven, Peter was an angry little boy. A Children’s Aid Society report written when Woodcock was eleven years old describes him as follows:

  Slight in build, neat in appearance, eye bright, and wide open, worried facial expression, sometimes screwing up of eyes, walks briskly and erect, moves rapidly, darts ahead, interested and questioning constantly in conversation . . .

  He attributes his wandering to feeling so nervous that he just has to get away. In some ways, Peter has little capacity for self-control. He appears to act out almost everything he thinks and demonstrates excessive affection for his foster mother. Although he verbalizes his resentment for other children, he has never been known to physically attack another child . . .

  Peter apparently has no friends. He plays occasionally with younger children, managing the play. When with children his own age, he is boastful and expresses determinedly ideas which are unacceptable and misunderstood.

  At one point, when the social worker was walking with Woodcock at Toronto’s annual fair—the Exhibition—little Peter muttered, “I wish a bomb would fall on the Exhibition and kill all the children.”

  Peter Woodcock was sent to a special school for emotionally disturbed children in Kingston, Ontario, a small town two hours east of Toronto. There, according to Woodcock, he began to act out on strong sexual urges with other children. He says that he had consensual intercourse with a twelve-year-old girl when he was thirteen. When Peter turned fifteen, he was discharged from the school and returned to live with his foster parents. He was reenrolled at the private school, where he remained isolated from the other children.

  When Woodcock was sixteen he was sent to a public high school where kids from the neighborhood instantly recognized him and severely tormented him. Six weeks later he was transferred to a private high school. His teachers there remember him as a very bright student who excelled in science, history, and English and frequently scored 100 percent on his tests. While his peers shunned him, many adults liked him for his quick wit and intelligence. He was remembered as charming and able to hold his own in conversations. He was also a frequent visitor to a police station near his home, where he would chat with officers about police work.

  Peter Woodcock’s prize possession was a red and white Pee-Wee Herman Schwinn bicycle on which he satisfied his continuing compulsion to wander. He rode the bike to the far reaches of the city, even during the Toronto deep cold winters. He evolved a fantasy in which he led a gang of five hundred invisible boys on bikes called the Winchester Heights Gang. His foster parents were aware of that fantasy and his obsession for the public transit system and compulsion to wander. But nobody knew exactly what the seventeen-year-old Peter did on his long bike rides in the city.

  Even today, Toronto is a remarkably crime-free city. With 2.5 million inhabitants it registers roughly fifty-two homicides a year—one a week on average. Back in 1956, the city’s population hovered around the 1 million mark but the city averaged a mere ten homicides a year. Most murders were typically the result of domestic disputes or drunken brawls. Weird and strange unsolved homicides rarely occurred in Toronto in those days. Then on the evening of September 15, 1956, seven-year-old Wayne Mallette went out to play and failed to come home.

  His body was found by the police approximately six hours later on the grounds of the Exhibition—the very same one on which Woodcock hoped a bomb would drop and kill all the children. The boy was dressed in a British schoolboy blazer, shirt, and plaid pants. It appeared that his clothing had been removed and he had then been re-dressed. The cause of death was strangulation. His face was pushed into the dirt and two bite marks were found on the body—one on the boy’s calf and the other on his buttock. There was no evidence of rape. Pennies were found ritualistically scattered near the body and the killer had apparently defecated next to the victim as well. Police found faint bicycle tracks near the crime scene. Witness
had recollections of a young teenage boy on a bike in the area.

  Nine days after the murder, a fourteen-year-old boy, Ronald Mowatt, skipped school and vanished for four days. He was found hiding by police in a crawlspace beneath a staircase with a blanket and pillow. To police, he seemed a likely suspect, and before the night was out he had even signed a confession stating that he had killed Mallette accidentally in a scuffle. Nobody bothered to compare the bite marks to the accused boy’s actual teeth, or if they did in those times before strict rules of discovery, nobody shared the information with the boy’s defense counsel.

  Three weeks later, nine-year-old Garry Morris was found dead in a grassy area near the city’s port. The boy appeared to have been strangled into unconsciousness and beaten to death; he had died of a ruptured liver. There was a bite mark on his throat and this time paper clips seemed to have been ritualistically sprinkled near the corpse. Again, the clothing had been removed from the victim and then he had been re-dressed. Witnesses recalled the victim riding off on the front handlebars of a bike ridden by a teenage boy.

  To this day there is no rational explanation why the Toronto police did not link the bite marks or the reports of the boy on a bike with the two child murders. Perhaps there was some police misbehavior behind Mowatt’s confession—backtracking might have risked the careers of some senior homicide investigators. Mowatt was quickly convicted of murder in juvenile court and packed off to a reformatory to serve an indeterminate sentence.

  On January 19, 1957, Carole Voyce, a four-year-old girl, was approached by a teenage boy on a bicycle while playing in front of her home and offered a ride. She was found dead later that night in a ravine under a bridge. Her clothes had been pulled off and she had been choked into unconsciousness. Her killer had stuck his fingers into her eyes, stripped off her clothes, and inserted his finger into her genitals. Death was caused by a branch pushed through her vagina. Tracks in the snow showed that the killer had attempted to leave the scene several times, but circled back to the victim again. At one point he had kicked her in the head. He was seen by witnesses biking out by a road at the bottom of the ravine.