Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

The Serial Killer As the Lonely Child

  One very common factor in the childhood of serial killers is their loneliness and isolation from their peers—even in cases where there is little or no maladjustment in parental histories. As children, they rarely fit in with their playmates. Henry Lucas and Albert DeSalvo were obviously isolated from other children outside their family by their living conditions, but the histories of other serial killers are frequently typical of Peter Woodcock’s. By the subtle rules of childhood society, they do not fit in—something is already out of kilter in their personalities.

  Both Berkowitz and Rifkin had lonely childhoods and harbored secret aggressive fantasies. Berkowitz surreptitiously crushed boxes of his grandparents’ fragile matzoh and saltine crackers. His grandparents always thought the damage had happened in the store. Like Woodcock, he killed his adopted mother’s pet—in this case, a bird. Berkowitz had no childhood friends. He said, “It was a mysterious force working against me. I felt bothered and tormented, ‘Die Schmutz’ [Yiddish for ‘the dirty one’].”

  Rifkin was adopted by college-educated parents who were very supportive of him and sensitive to his handicap—dyslexia, a learning disability that makes it difficult to read and spell correctly. (Lee Harvey Oswald also had it.) Rifkin unfortunately was also clumsy and stuttered slightly, isolating him from his peers. He was bullied and the butt of jokes throughout his high school career, and he maintained a very lonely existence despite his place on the track team and position as yearbook photographer. When the yearbook came out, all the students who worked on it threw a party—and Joel was the only one not invited. Rifkin showed no signs of anger and frequently took the abuse in stoic silence. Later, however, he revealed that he secretly harbored fantasies of torturing and killing passive female slaves.

  Rifkin made it into his first year of community college and had several girlfriends, but he appeared to them uncommunicative and unemotional. By now Rifkin was patronizing prostitutes. He brought one home to his parents’ house and she subsequently robbed him. The next one he brought home, he killed. He went on to murder seventeen women until 1992, when police discovered a corpse in his pickup truck during a routine stop.

  In 1998 police arrested twenty-seven-year-old Kendall Francois—a six-foot-four, 300-pound public school hall monitor nicknamed “Stinky” because of his bad personal hygiene. He was charged with the murder of eight Poughkeepsie, New York, prostitutes. They were found in plastic bags in the attic of his parents’ house and under the front porch. The entire neighborhood complained about the smell, but Francois convinced his parents it was coming from dead raccoons in the attic.

  Kendall was taunted throughout his childhood because of his excessive weight. When he passed by, the children taunted the overweight black youth, “How now brown cow.” He is remembered by his fellow students and teachers as a “gentle giant” with limited intellectual abilities. He participated on the wrestling and football teams and attempted to adopt various identities. One high school picture shows him standing apart from the wrestling team, showing off his recently developed muscles. Another picture shows him posing in a preppy cardigan, his hand thoughtfully poised beneath his chin, a school ring prominently visible on his finger. But again, Kendall had no friends in school.

  Loneliness gives these individuals time and space within which to develop, evolve, and dwell upon a fantasy life. The hostile and disempowering circumstances behind their loneliness often gives these fantasies a nasty and violent context focused on revenge and the desire for power. (See the discussion on the role of fantasy later in this chapter.)

  The Serial Killer and His Mother

  Feminist theoreticians deeply dislike the mother component of serial killer theory, dismissing it as just another aspect of the “blame it on mother” gynocidal aspect of the male drive to kill females. Perhaps. Nonetheless, there are remarkably many serial killers whose mothers showed tendency to be highly controlling, overbearing, or overprotective of their sons.

  This supports the theory that some serial killers’ behaviors are rooted in gender identification involving a boy’s ability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother—a challenge not faced by females. When a boy cannot achieve this autonomy or when there is no solid foundation for him from which to negotiate this autonomy, a sense of rage develops in the child, and he subsequently carries the anger into adolescence and adulthood.

  We saw that Kenneth Bianchi’s adopted mother seemed to be hysterically concerned with Kenneth’s health as a child, and that the child responded to these concerns with ailments. Peter Woodcock’s foster mother is described as highly controlling and seems to have relished the challenge of her troubled foster child’s behavioral problems. Upon being arrested, Woodcock feared only one thing: “My fear was that Mother would find out. Mother was my biggest fear. I didn’t know if the police would let her at me.” Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, is remembered as a normal child except for his strange need to constantly cling to his mother’s skirt. Joseph Kallinger’s mother refused to allow him to play outside, flogged him with a whip, beat him with a hammer, threatened to cut off his genitals, and selected his wife for him. Ed Gein so worshipped his mother that he preserved her bedroom as a shrine (but not her corpse, as in the Hitchcock movie Psycho.)

  Other serial killers have had mothers who were either rejecting or blatantly abusive of them. Even in his adult life, Arthur Shawcross was obsessed with pleasing his critical mother. Just before he was arrested for killing eleven prostitutes, he had sent his mother a carefully selected expensive gift, which she kept but wrote back that he was a fool for wasting his money on stupid junk. Edmund Kemper’s mother kept him locked in the basement; Jerry Brudos’s mom stuck him in the back shed. One does not need a degree in psychology to understand why children like that may grow up hating females and harboring raging homicidal fantasies.

  Cases of serial killers—particularly sexual killers—where the mother was characterized as loving and encouraging toward the son’s independence are rare except in some cases of adopted children—or in the case of Ted Bundy, who thought he was adopted.

  The father seems to play a lesser role in the formation of the serial killer. Nonetheless, abusive or offender fathers frequently become role models in the child’s future.

  Family Stability and History

  The FBI study reveals that sexual and serial killers often came from unstable family backgrounds where infant bonding was likely to be disrupted. Only 57 percent of killers in the FBI study had both parents at birth, and 47 percent had their father leave before age twelve. A mother as the dominant parent was reported in 66 percent of the cases, and 44 percent reported having a negative relationship with their mother. A negative relationship with the father or male parental figure was reported by 72 percent of the convicted sex killers.

  The history of the parents had also a great role to play in the child’s future. Researchers at the Washington School of Medicine determined that biological children of parents with criminal records are four times as likely to commit criminal acts themselves as adults—even if they have been adopted by law-abiding parents! The FBI study showed that 50 percent of the offenders had parents with criminal pasts and 53 percent came from families with psychiatric histories. 161

  Gerald Gallego, Jr., for example, was nine years old when his twenty-six-year-old father, Gerald Gallego, Sr., was executed in Mississippi’s gas chamber for two murders. When Gerald Jr. was thirteen he was charged with having sex with a six-year-old girl. By age thirty-two he had been married seven times and was living in California.

  William Mansfield, Jr., on whose property in Florida police discovered the remains of at least six murdered women, was the son of William Mansfield, Sr., serving a thirty-year prison term for child molestation.

  The FBI’s research program describes one unnamed killer’s background:

  The offender’s father shot and killed one of his own brothers when the subject was thirteen. Prior
to this crime, the father had been investigated concerning acts of arson and insurance fraud. The father was tried for the murder but found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was diagnosed during the trial as suffering from paranoia. The father was also suspected in the killings of two other persons, including a trespasser on his property and a foster child who had disappeared. After the murder, the father was committed to a state mental hospital; however, two years later he escaped with the help of the subject’s mother.162

  Childhood Mental and Physical Trauma

  Many serial killers had a truly traumatic childhood. In the FBI study, 42 percent of the killers reported physical abuse and 74 percent reported psychological abuse, while 35 percent reported witnessing sexual violence as children and 43 percent reported being sexually abused themselves. “Sexually stressful events” were reported by 73 percent of sex killers, and 50 percent admitted that their first rape fantasies began between ages twelve and fourteen. It should be noted that the FBI carefully structured its survey to eliminate self-pity and explanatory tendencies from the offenders surveyed: When asked, only 53 percent of the serial and sex killers felt themselves to have been treated unfairly as children, despite the higher reported rates of abuse.

  Some psychiatrists explain the development of psychopathic tendencies as simply the brain’s defensive mechanisms. An infant that is denied human touch and affection develops a sense of only itself—it becomes completely oblivious to others. This is necessary for the infant to survive. When that infant becomes an adult, that sense of self and disregard of others becomes defined as “psychopathology.” Thus what starts in the infant’s brain as a purely defensive mechanism can become a destructive trait in adulthood.

  Physical trauma, particularly head injuries, is evident in the childhood histories of many serial killers. Earle Leonard Nelson was dragged under a streetcar at age ten and remained in a coma for six days; Carlton Gary, Richard Ramirez, and John Wayne Gacy were knocked unconscious by playground swings; Gary Heidnik fell out of a tree in grade school, causing an injury that prompted his classmates to call him “football head”; Bobby Joe Long fell from a pony and remained nauseated and dizzy for weeks; Max Gufler was subject to uncontrollable outbursts of rage after being struck on the head with a rock at age nine. The FBI sexual killer study showed that 29 percent of the subjects were “accident prone” in childhood.

  Henry Lee Lucas

  In some cases it is not that the psychopath necessarily wants to hurt somebody, but that he simply does not care whether he does so or not. Eventually the sexual act becomes interchangeable with murder. Henry Lee Lucas explained, “I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. If I don’t, I don’t. I rape them. I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them. Dogs, I’ve killed them to have with them—always killed before I had sex. I’ve had sex with them while they’re still alive only sometimes. Then killing became the same things as having sex.”163

  Officially, Lucas was convicted of killing “only” eleven people, mostly hitchhikers in Texas along Highway I-35. However, he claimed to have committed 360 murders across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, beginning from 1952, when he was fifteen years old, until his arrest in 1982. Police discount some of his confessions and believe that most likely he killed in the vicinity of “only” a hundred people, tops.

  At one point in his history, Lucas was joined in his killing by Ottis Elwood Toole, a cannibalistic male prostitute. There was no recognizable sense or pattern to their killing. The victims were men, women, and children. They were young and they were old; they were prostitutes, businessmen, homemakers, tramps, and students. They were strangled, shot, stabbed, and battered to death. Some were raped; others were not. Some were mutilated and cannibalized while others were carefully buried. Some victims have never been identified to this day. Lucas’s childhood history can serve as a manual on how to incubate a serial killer. It includes virtually every factor reported by different serial killers in one single life.

  Henry Lee Lucas was born in one of America’s poorest regions—Blacksburg, Virginia—in 1937. Viola Lucas, his mother, was a prostitute; his father, Anderson, was an alcoholic who had earlier in a drunken stupor fallen on some railway tracks and had both his legs amputated by a slowly moving train. He now supported himself and the family by skinning minks, selling pencils, and distilling illicit alcohol. The father taught Henry how to maintain their illegal distillery while he went off to get drunk. Henry himself was drinking hard liquor by age ten, and of his legless father he only remembers, “He hopped around on his ass all his life.”

  Viola insisted that both Henry and his father watch her having sex with her customers in a dirt-floor three-room cabin in which they lived. If they refused, she beat them with a club. Henry said, “I don’t think any child out there should be brought up in that type of environment. In the past, I’ve hated it. It’s just inside me hate, and I can’t get away from it.”

  One of Lucas’s earliest memories is of his mother shooting one of her customers in the leg with a shotgun after having sex and Henry being splashed with the man’s blood. From then on he seemed to be fascinated by blood and its association with sex.

  When Henry was thirteen, his father got drunk, crawled out into the snow, and lay there until he caught pneumonia and died.

  Viola beat Henry with broom handles, sticks, pieces of timber, or anything else she found. She did not allow him to cry when she was beating him, and she constantly told him that he was born evil and would die in prison. He claims that the only thing he ever loved was a pet mule, but when his mother found out about his affection for it, she forced him to watch as she shot it dead. She then beat him for how much it was going to cost to haul the dead animal away.

  One day when Henry was too slow getting wood for the stove, Viola hit him so hard with a piece of lumber that he remained unconscious for three days until he was finally taken to a hospital. Afterward he recalled frequent incidents of dizziness, blackouts, and weightless sensation. About a year later, while roughhousing with his brother, Henry was accidentally sliced with a knife across his left eye. The eye was left untreated and eventually had to be replaced with a glass eye.

  Henry admitted to having sex with his half-brother and to the two of them cutting the throats of animals and performing acts of bestiality. He later said, “Sex is one of my downfalls.”

  On his first day of school, Viola sent Henry to class dressed as a girl, with his long hair set in curls and wearing a dress. Ironically, Ottis Toole, who would partner with Lucas in the crime spree, was also dressed as a girl in petticoats and lace by his mother. At least seven male serial killers, including Charles Manson, are known to have been dressed as girls in their childhood. Eddie Cole, who murdered thirteen victims, was dressed as “Mamma’s little girl” by his mother and forced to serve drinks to her guests.164

  One would think that serial killers exaggerate their childhood backgrounds in attempt to gain sympathy, and many do. In the case of Henry Lee Lucas, however, the details of his childhood history have been independently corroborated through various sources and witnesses, including his neighbors and former schoolteacher. Lucas was not exaggerating when he said, “They ain’t got, I don’t think, a human being alive that can say he had the childhood I had.”

  Biochemistry

  There are questions as to whether there are biological factors linked to serial killing. After Henry Lee Lucas was convicted, he underwent numerous neurological tests that revealed fairly extensive brain damage. Small contusions indicated a frontal lobe injury, and there was damage to his temporal lobe and pools of spinal fluid at the base of his brain. There was an enlargement of the right and left Sylvian fissure at the expense of the surrounding brain tissue, which indicated significant loss of judgmental functions and was the result of head injuries sustained in childhood. CAT scans and nuclear magnetic resonance tests confirmed a brain abnormality consistent with an individual with diminished control
over violent impulses.

  Toxicology tests revealed unusually high levels of lead and cadmium in his nerve tissue, which combined with years of alcohol abuse to destroy a significant part of his cerebral capacity. Three indicators of cadmium poisoning are loss of dream recall, excessively strong body odor, and loss of sense of smell. Lucas does not remember his dreams and rode in a car through Texas heat with the head of one of his victims for more than three days, oblivious to the smell of the decaying flesh. His teacher recalls that as a child, Lucas smelled very bad.

  Malnutrition can also be a significant contributor to brain damage. Viola forced Lucas and his father to scrounge for food on the streets and in garbage cans. His teacher reports that she brought him to her home to feed him hot meals, and Lucas recalls that those were the only hot meals he received in his life prior to jail.

  Substance Abuse

  Maternal alcohol or drug abuse also increases the chances of prenatal injury of the fetus. The FBI study indicated that 69 percent of subjects indicated a family history of alcohol abuse and 33 percent had family problems with drugs.

  Other family violence can also potentially injure the unborn child. The father of Patrick Mackay in England repeatedly kicked his wife in the stomach while she was expecting the child. Mackay’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic until he died when Mackay was ten years old. The son then seems to have adopted the father’s identity. He assaulted other children at his school and tortured animals. He became addicted to alcohol at an early age and became, like his father, violent under its influence. By the time he was fifteen, social workers had described Mackay as “a cold psychopathic killer.”

  Mackay began killing at age twenty-two in London in 1974. His victims were usually elderly women, whom he would stab or strangle in their homes and then rob. Mackay was caught when he returned to rob a sixty-four-year-old Catholic priest who had helped him two years earlier. He stabbed the priest in his home and then split his head open with an axe; however, this failed to kill the priest. Mackay then put him into a bathtub full of water and sat on the edge for an hour as the priest died. Because the police were aware of the connection between Mackay and the victim, he was apprehended within forty-eight hours and eventually charged with five murders, but suspected in a total of eleven.