Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  Kemper then took Luchessa out of the car and locked her in the trunk. Within thirty seconds of apologizing to Pesce for accidentally brushing against her breast, he threw a plastic bag over her head and wrapped a bathrobe belt around her neck. But as he pulled on the belt, it snapped; meanwhile Pesce had bitten through the plastic bag. Kemper then drew his knife and began to stab Pesce in the back, but the blows did not seem to have any effect and she began to twist around, facing Kemper. He then stabbed her in the side and in the stomach, and Pesce twisted back the other way. He then grabbed her by the chin, pulled back her head, and slit her throat.

  Kemper then went to the back of the car, opened the trunk, pulled Luchessa out, and began to stab her repeatedly in the throat, eyes, heart, and forearms. He recalled being surprised by how many heavy blows she took before losing consciousness.

  Once the women were dead, he drove their corpses back to his apartment and carried them inside. In his apartment he dissected their bodies, handled their various internal organs, snapped Polaroid photographs of them, and cut their heads off. Kemper confessed, “I remember there was actually a sexual thrill. You hear that little ‘pop’ and pull their heads off and hold their heads up by the hair. Whipping their heads off, their body sitting there. That’d get me off!” But Kemper insisted, “There was absolutely no contact with improper areas.”

  Kemper said, “I would sit there looking at the heads on an overstuffed chair, tripping on them on my bed, looking at them [when] one of them somehow becomes unsettled, comes rolling down the chair, very grisly. Tumbling down the chair, rolls across the cushion and hits the rug—‘bonk.’ The neighbor downstairs hates my guts. I’m always making noise late at night. He gets a broom and whacks on the ceiling. ‘Buddy,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry for that, dropped my head, sorry.’ That helped bring me out of the depression. I would trip on that.”

  Afterward Kemper put what remained of the two women into plastic bags and buried them in the Santa Cruz hills, their torsos and limbs in one location, their hands in another, disguising the burial ground using techniques he had learned in the Boy Scouts. He kept the heads a few days longer before throwing them into a ravine. He returned to the grave where Pesce’s headless body lay because, as he explained, he loved her and wanted to be near her.

  Kemper said that just before he began killing, his fantasies of making love to women became dissatisfying because he came to believe he could never realize them. If he killed them, then they would not reject him as a man, he explained. He characterized his crimes as “making dolls” out of human beings.

  On September 14, 1972, Kemper picked up fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo hitchhiking to a dance class in San Francisco. He took her to another remote area, choked her into unconsciousness, raped her, and then finished killing her. He placed her body in the trunk and on his way home stopped off for a beer. Emerging from the bar, Kemper said he opened the trunk of the car, “admiring my catch like a fisherman.” He took the corpse back to his apartment, dissected it, had sex with it, and cut off the head.

  The next day Ed Kemper had a scheduled appointment with his probation psychiatrists. In the morning before heading out to the appointment, Kemper buried Koo’s body at one location and her hands at another, but kept her head. He then drove to the psychiatrists’ office with the head locked in the trunk of his car. Leaving his car in the parking lot, he went in for his interview. The psychiatric report resulting from that day’s visit reads:

  If I were seeing this patient without having any history available or without getting the history from him, I would think that we’re dealing with a very well adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence and who was free of any psychiatric illness . . . In effect, we are dealing with two different people when we talk of the 15 year old boy who committed the murder and of the 23 year old man we see before us now . . . It is my opinion that he has made a very excellent response to the years of treatment and rehabilitation and I would see no psychiatric reason to consider him to be of any danger to himself or to any member of society.

  The second psychiatrist cheerfully added:

  He appears to have made a good recovery from such a tragic and violent split within himself. He appears to be functioning in one piece now directing his feelings towards verbalization, work, sports and not allowing neurotic buildup with himself. Since it may allow him more freedom as an adult to develop his potential, I would consider it reasonable to have a permanent expunction of his juvenile records. I am glad he had recently “expunged” his motorcycle and I would hope that he would do that (“seal it”) permanently since this seemed more a threat to his life and health than any threat he is presently to anyone else.

  One can only wonder what the psychiatrists’ diagnoses would have been if either of them had looked into the trunk of Kemper’s car that morning.

  On November 29, 1972, Kemper’s juvenile record was permanently sealed so that he could go on with his life. In the meantime, he had moved back home with his domineering mother.

  On January 8, 1973, he picked up college student Cindy Schall. He shot her in the head and then drove back with her body to his mother’s house. While his mother wasn’t looking, he put Schall’s body in his bedroom closet and went to sleep. In the morning when his mother went to work, he took the corpse to bed with him and had sex with it. Afterward he placed the cadaver in his mother’s bathtub, drained it of blood, carved it up into pieces, bagged them in plastic, and threw them off a cliff. He kept Schall’s head for several days, often having sex with it. Afterward Kemper buried her head in his mother’s yard, facing up toward his mother’s bedroom window. He said he did this because his mother always wanted people to “look up to her.”

  Santa Cruz was plagued at that time with a series of bizarre unsolved murders, and warnings had been issued to students not to accept rides from strangers. But Kemper’s mother had given him a university sticker for his car so that he could easily enter the campus to pick her up from work. This sticker gave women a sense of security when he offered them a ride.

  On February 5, 1973, he shot two more women and brought them back to his mother’s house. He cut off one woman’s head in the trunk of his car, and when his mother went to bed he carried the headless corpse to his room and slept with it in his bed. Kemper explained, “The head trip fantasies were a bit like a trophy. You know, the head is where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That’s the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off . . . Well, that’s not quite true. With a girl, there is a lot left in the girl’s body without the head. Of course, the personality is gone.”158

  On Easter weekend in 1973, Kemper finally decided to face his nemesis. At 5:15 A.M. he walked into his mother’s bedroom while she slept and struck her head with a claw hammer. He then rolled her over and slit her throat. Upon killing his mother, Kemper said, he was shocked at how vulnerable and human she had been—that she had died just like his other victims. He said that before then he had always perceived his mother as foreboding, fierce, and formidable, and whether he hated or loved her, she had always been a big influence in his life. Upon killing her, he felt relief.

  Kemper then decided, “what’s good for my victims was good for my mother.” Kemper cut her head off and raped her headless corpse. He removed her larynx and fed it into the garbage disposal. “It seemed appropriate as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years,” he later told the police. When he turned on the disposal, it jammed, throwing back up his mother’s voice box. “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up,” Kemper recalled bitterly.

  Kemper then telephoned his mother’s best friend, Sally Hallett, and invited her over for a “surprise” dinner party for his mother. He punched her, strangled her, and cut her head off, placing it in his bed. He then spent the night sleeping in his mother’s bed.

  Before Kemper drove away from his mother’s
house, he left a note for the police:

  Appx. 5:15 A.M. Saturday. No need for her to suffer any more at the hands of this horrible “murderous Butcher.” It was quick—asleep—the way I wanted it.

  Not sloppy and incomplete, gents. Just a “lack of time.” I got things to do!!!

  Kemper began an aimless drive out of Santa Cruz, through Nevada and into Colorado. After several days of constant driving, he pulled over at a telephone booth, called the Santa Cruz police, and confessed to being the Coed Killer. It took several calls before they took him seriously and dispatched the local police in Colorado to pick him up as he quietly waited by the phone booth. Kemper recalls, “It was very late at night, I was exhausted . . . I was past exhaustion. I was just running on pure adrenaline. My body was quivering . . . and my mind was slowly just beginning to unravel. I had lost control of my body. I had experienced this in the killing of my grandparents when I was fifteen. I just completely lost control of myself. But as far as my mind went, I had realized what was going on and I couldn’t stop it. In this case my body was just exhausted and my mind was starting to go. I was hallucinating. I finally had a thought. I was trying to think, ‘Wow, I have got to stop this because it is getting so far out of hand. I am not going to be responsible for what happens any further’. . . and I didn’t like that idea.” Paradoxically, Kemper began to fear that he would begin to kill outside the parameters of his own insane logic. Kemper had enough insight into his condition to turn himself in once he killed his mother, and to later analyze his crimes with FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit researchers.

  Kemper, for example, had nothing but disdain for fellow serial killer Herbert Mullin, who was killing in Santa Cruz to prevent earthquakes about the same time that Kemper was committing his murders. “He was just a cold-blooded killer . . . killing everybody he saw for no good reason,” Kemper complained. But having said that, he immediately commented on the irony of his so “self-righteously talking like that, after what I’ve done.”

  Kemper and Mullin were incarcerated in the same prison block, and Kemper tormented Mullin by calling him “Herbie,” a diminutive Mullin hated. “He had a habit of singing and bothering people when somebody tried to watch TV. So I threw water on him to shut him up. Then, when he was a good boy, I’d give him peanuts. Herbie liked peanuts. That was effective, because pretty soon he asked permission to sing. That’s called behavior modification treatment.”159

  Asked if Kemper thought Mullin was insane, he replied, “Yes, judging from my years in Atascadero, I would say he is mentally ill.”

  On why Kemper stopped killing and surrendered to the police, Kemper said, “The original purpose was gone. It was starting to weigh kind of heavy. Let’s say I started returning to some lucid moments where I—where I started to burn out the hate and fear . . . and the need that I had for continuing death was needless and ridiculous. It wasn’t serving any physical or real or emotional purpose. It was just a pure waste of time.”

  Kemper concludes, “I couldn’t keep on going forever . . . I really couldn’t have. Emotionally, I couldn’t handle it much longer. Toward the end there, I started feeling the folly of the whole damn thing, and at the point of near exhaustion, near collapse, I just said the hell with it and called it all off. Let’s say . . . I wore out of it.”

  “I wore out of it.” Kemper called the police and surrendered. It is likely that Andrew Cunanan shot himself for the same reason after killing Gianni Versace—he “wore out of it.” Albert DeSalvo “grew out of it.” Other serial killers who do not get caught neither surrender nor kill themselves, but simply “retire,” leaving behind an unsolved mystery and a pile of corpses. The Zodiac Killer stopped killing and was never identified; the Green River Killer mysteriously ceased killing (although that did not stop police from identifying Gary Ridgway nearly twenty years later; it is believed that Ridgway in fact continued to kill, but less frequently and sporadically).

  Asked what he thinks now when he sees a pretty woman, Kemper replied in probably his most often quoted remark, “One side of me says, ‘Wow, what a pretty chick, I’d like to talk to her, date her.’ The other side of me says, ‘I wonder how her head would look like on a stick.’ ”*

  Kemper has been eligible and applying for parole since 1980. He has been refused . . . so far.

  What each of these cases demonstrates is that a psychiatric context is virtually impossible to definitively identify in cases of serial murder. Serial killers seem to come close to a psychiatric definition of psychopaths, but in the final analysis, they elude existing categories.

  Forensic psychologist Stephen J. Giannangelo suggests that serial killers be given a new and separate category in the next DSM edition. He proposes the following category:

  312.40 Homicidal Pattern Disorder

  Deliberate and purposeful murder or attempt at murder of strangers on more than one occasion.

  Tension or affective arousal at some time before the act.

  Pleasure, gratification, or relief in commission or reflection of the acts.

  Personality traits consistent with diagnosis of at least one Cluster B Personality Disorder (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic).

  Understanding the illegality of actions and continuation to avoid apprehension.

  Murders not motivated by monetary gain, to conceal criminal activity, to express anger or vengeance, in response to a delusion or hallucination, or as a result of impaired judgment (e.g., in dementia, mental retardation, substance intoxication).160

  SIX

  SERIAL KILLERS AS CHILDREN:

  The Making of Monsters

  I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing.

  —ED KEMPER

  Mother was my biggest fear.

  —PETER WOODCOCK

  From the case histories of Peter Woodcock, Edward Kemper, Kenneth Bianchi, and Jerry Brudos in previous chapters, one can see that these killers had all exhibited abnormal behavior in their childhood combined with unusual family circumstances: Woodcock, given up for adoption; Kemper, abused by a neurotic, overbearing mother; Bianchi, subjected to his mother’s neurotic fears; Brudos, subjected to his mother’s derision. But many people are given up for adoption, and many grow up with domineering mothers—they do not all become serial killers. Were these killers born with something that made them respond with murder to the circumstances of their childhood? For example, both Woodcock and Kemper killed their family pets at a very early age—the killer instinct was apparently there in early childhood. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam also killed his adopted mother’s pet bird. Animal cruelty along with bedwetting and acts of arson are frequently found in the behavioral history of serial killers when they were children.

  Scientists and psychologists have been puzzling for decades over the mystery of serial killers and have collected a huge amount of data that is beginning to reveal certain distinct patterns. The most groundbreaking study was probably the one carried out by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit in which FBI agents interviewed thirty-six sex murderers, including serial killers, about every detail of their life and crime. Since then, many other projects have attempted to confront the question of what motivates serial killers. The conclusion is that serial killers are both made and born.

  When children born with certain predetermined factors are then subjected to certain life experiences, they are highly likely to become serial killers. But it is not a simple and predictable one-two-three step-by-step progression. Unraveling the making of a serial killer is like aligning a Rubik’s Cube.

  The Serial Killer As Infant

  The single most common factor attributed to serial killers is the likely absence of infant bonding. From the very first weeks an infant attempts to establish contact with its mother through smiles, gestures, and crying. If its efforts are rewarded with affectionate touching and attention, a baby reaches out into the world to grasp and feed. As it grows, an infant begins to distinguish between strangers and parents and between vari
ous familiar people, and it seeks close contact with its parents in a bonding process. These early stages are crucial to the adult personality because it is believed that 50 percent of a human’s “life knowledge,” which forms the behavioral and personality components, is acquired in the first twelve months, and another 25 percent in the second year. The remaining 25 percent of life knowledge is acquired between age three and death. It is believed that infants who are deprived of human affection and touch can be substantially developed psychopaths by age two, lacking a normally developed range of human emotions such as sympathy, empathy, remorse, and affection.

  It is questionable how much affection Peter Woodcock’s birth mother would have shown him during the month she had him, knowing that he would be given up for adoption. It is therefore possible that no amount of loving care could have overcome the damage already done to Peter Woodcock before the Maynard family took him in.

  Adoption is a frequent characteristic of serial killers. Kenneth Bianchi was adopted, as were David Berkowitz and Joel Rifkin, who murdered seventeen prostitutes in the New York area. Berkowitz and Rifkin interestingly enough are among the few rare cases of Jewish serial killers—although Berkowitz became a born-again Christian shortly before he began killing. Both were adopted into loving and stable families, which challenges the argument that chaotic family environment alone can create a serial killer.