Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Nazism was to a great extent a cult, but its ideology seemed to play almost no role in the crimes of Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, nor did “following orders” appear to have much to do with it in the two women’s cases, since they were acting mostly on their own initiative. Historians, sociologists, and psychologists have been struggling to explain how so many “ordinary” people in Germany ended up serially murdering so many victims. We are not talking about the “banality of evil” bureaucrats who killed from behind their desks, never actually seeing their victims, but of the thousands of people who were killing one on one, with blood splashing into their faces—all serial killers.

  One of the earliest theories, suggested by Theodor Adorno, was that there was a type of testable “Authoritarian Personality Type” that could be scored on a so-called F-scale. Some of the personality features consisted of:

  rigid adherence to conventional values

  submissiveness to authority figures

  aggressiveness toward out groups

  opposition to introspection, reflection, and creativity

  preoccupation with power and “toughness”

  destructiveness and cynicism

  projectivity—a disposition to believe that dangerous conspiratorial things go on in the world

  an exaggerated concern with sexuality

  Some of these characteristics are reminiscent of some of the psychopathology found among serial killers. According to Adorno, fascist cult movements encourage such personalities to express themselves in cruel and violent ways against ideologically targeted out groups.237

  This approach has come under severe criticism. Historian Zygmunt Bauman dismissed it, arguing that it was as if saying: “Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.” Bauman rejected Adorno’s authoritarian personality type because it implied that ordinary people did not commit atrocities.238

  John Steiner suggested a version of the authoritarian personality type, the so-called “sleeper,” a latently violent personality that is unleashed by circumstance, such as an encounter with the violent subculture of the Nazi movement.239

  Ervin Staub accepts Steiner’s idea that people can be latently violent, but believes that the so-called “sleeper” is a very common trait to most people—that all human beings have a primary capacity for violence. There is a little bit of a serial killer in all of us. Staub says, “Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”240

  Bauman disagrees. He argues that most people slip into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of the “faulty personality” as a cause behind cruelty. Evil is situational, according to Bauman. Serial killers are made.

  There is some evidence for this. Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University conducted an experiment where he set up a mock prison. Using personality tests, he filtered out sadistic personality types among those volunteering as guards. Yet within six days, volunteers who did not test for sadistic traits began to devise rapidly escalating brutal and cruel methods to control and deal with the volunteer prisoners. Zimbardo concluded that the prison situation alone was a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, antisocial behavior.

  Zimbardo discovered that a third of the eleven guards emerged as cruel and tough, constantly inventing new ways to torment their prisoners; a middle group tended to be tough but fair and played by the rules, even if they were cruel, but did not exceed that cruelty on their own initiative; and only two guards actually went out of their way not to be cruel or showed acts of kindness to the prisoners.

  If brutality and serial killing can be situational, then before we dismiss Ilse Koch and Irma Grese as Nazi bitches, we need to take a closer look into the face of the former Kentucky-born and -bred chicken factory worker and IGA cashier Lynndie Rana England, who, at the age of 21, found herself caught on camera while tormenting and abusing naked prisoners as a reservist in a military police company in Iraq assigned to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Lynndie never killed anybody, but is that the difference between her and Grese? How far did Lynndie have left to go? How many of us have a serial killer inside ready to be unleashed in the right situation? Is the process of becoming a serial killer much simpler and easier than we suspect?

  The Manson Cult Women—Charlie’s Hippie-Killer Girls

  Let’s fast-forward from the gloomy, musty, barbed-wired Europe of our grandmothers to where surf Nazis must die—to the sunshine of California twenty-five years later, to Charlie Manson’s apocalypse and the killer girls who followed him into it. It’s a very witchy story in a witchy place at a witchy time—the West Coast in the sixties. It was the Age of Aquarius: sex, drugs, music, freedom, sunshine and ocean and mass graves.

  The girls met Manson when they were mostly in their late teens. They were in their early twenties when they descended down from the dark of the night onto upscale homes in Los Angeles, beating, garroting, shooting, and stabbing to death the wealthy occupants, finger-painting slogans in their blood on their white walls and brand-new appliances. One of the victims was an eight-month pregnant starlet, Sharon Tate, the wife of movie director Roman Polanski. Charles Manson, himself, did not kill any of the victims and was not even present at the actual killings. But Manson is the ultimate “Everest” in the tale of these female killers—simply always there.

  Today Manson won’t let anybody forget that he has been in prison since 1969 for seven murders—none of which he physically committed. He is right about that. It’s a fact. But as somebody once said about him, “Charlie had a way of taking the truth and making it into a lie.” What Charlie did was he got a whole bunch of young women and a few men to go out and do the killing for him.

  Nearly forty years later, we cannot get Charles Manson and the Manson women out of our minds: They are the shadow in every baby boomer’s sweet memory of another time long past. Manson represents in our collective consciousness how the sixties came to die: Manson with a swastika hand-tattooed into his forehead, and his killer girls, chanting and screaming at their trial, “Why don’t you just kill us all now,” each one with an X branded into her forehead with hot hairpins, right between the eyes. And all the raggedy, hippie Manson girls outside, barefoot on the court building lawn, some with their heads shaved, with their own X carved into their foreheads as well. And several years later, the Manson girl, Squeaky, pulling a gun on President Gerald Ford. All the other murders attributed to shadowy Manson followers still unsolved. The nightmare did not stop with Manson’s imprisonment. There was the Geraldo Rivera TV specials with Manson, including one live from prison in 1989, twenty years after the event.

  GERALDO: “Mostly the devil in your world, eh, Charlie?”

  MANSON: “Okay. I’ll play. I’ll be the devil.”

  GERALDO: “You look more guilty than anyone I’ve ever looked in the eye in my whole entire life.”

  MANSON: “Really? Oh boy, that mirror is gonna be heavy for you to carry, ain’t it?”

  Charlie Manson was, and is, as I write this in the winter of 2007, a clever, mean old snake. But Manson does not, and did not, know what he said from day to day—and that’s the problem. But he said it all beautifully with a mad poet’s flurry. Unfortunately, Manson had a dark, nasty core that burned deep within him. He was an old-time hillbilly who did some real hard time from the age of eight in the American reformatory and prison system of the 1940s…and throughout the 1950s…and for the first six and a half years of the 1960s. Prison was his home. Other than that, Charlie was like most of us. He had his good, sweet days when he saved lives and he had days that were not so sweet—those low, dark times when Charlie raged a deep, black rage and destroyed and killed those he had earlier saved.

  Charlie was a spoken hurricane—his poet’s rap powered by a charismatic sincerity rooted in a backwoods tradition of old-time religion, the kind that comes with the zeal of speaking in tongues or snake handling, honed once in the California prison system b
y cellblock lessons in the techniques of Scientology and fine guitar playing. Charlie had it all and too much.

  Manson still inspires a cadre of followers today: “ATWA—air trees water animals” is still the mantra for a third generation of Manson defenders, many born long after the sixties died. Just google “ATWA” for the key into that dark kingdom on the Internet. ATWA is a sort of environmentalist fundamentalism—the Charlieban, the black green vowing holy war on the “piggies” chopping down our forests, pissing into our water, and unjustly imprisoning Manson.

  Charlie Manson really was a good poet and lyricist, and a kind of savant philosopher who could have today, in the age of Amazon.com, made a million had he not gone over the edge back then. He would say things like, “Time is a game that’s played with money.” Or “Do the unexpected. No sense makes sense.” But he mixed it with LSD and weed—his psyche already whacked by pools of his own natural body meth—perhaps kryptopyrrole from his piss, when in his head, rotting away all semblance of reason and compassion. The broken Boys Town childhood buried what was left in layers of rage, which would jack-in-the-box out of him in bad times, along with the brilliantly clever turns of phrase and poetry.

  With his dark man-boyish looks—all denim and leather and suede and whisky, incense and bullshit, mental crank and Bowie knives—Charlie got laid a lot in the sixties. He called himself the “Gardener,” planting his seed among the flower children, a sex-preacher man in the Age of Aquarius darkened by Altamont. Charlie took Woodstock and dune-buggied it out into Death Valley for us. Both men and women followed Charlie Manson into the abyss, but mostly it was the women who were loyal to the end. They closed up the sixties for us, in that last summer of 1969, finger-painting obscenities in blood on the naïveté of the age. We will never get the sixties back again—it’s an impossibility that the Mansonites had as much to do with as anything.

  The Tate Murders: “Have You Ever Tasted Blood? It’s Warm and Sticky and Nice.”

  On the night of August 8, 1969, 26-year-old Sharon Tate had everything going for her. A harmless and pretty actress, she had married a tortured and brilliant successful film director—Roman Polanski. Her husband had just bought her a white Rolls Royce in England, and her only problem was that her red Ferrari in L.A. was out for repairs. Sharon was in the final stages of her pregnancy and she and Roman settled in a rented house in Los Angeles—not just any house, but one of those palatial, gated and walled estates with a swimming pool and guesthouse on the hillside of Bel Air. The house had been previously occupied by actress Candice Bergen and record and television producer Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son.

  Feeling lonely while Polanski was finishing a script in England, Sharon Tate invited three of her friends to stay over at the house. They, too, were “beautiful people” in what today would be that Paris Hilton way: Abigail Folger, 25, the heiress to a multimillion-dollar coffee empire; Voytek Frykowski, 32, Folger’s lover and a friend of Polanski’s from Poland, and Jay Sebring, 35, a highly successful entertainment industry hairstylist and Tate’s former boyfriend.

  They were vapid and wealthy but reasonably decent people. They were settling into their beds for an early night when what would later be described as a crazed, howling, drugged horde of murderous hippies vaulted the walls of the estate and butchered them all.

  It was around 12:30 a.m. The doors of the house were locked, but the baby’s nursery had just been painted that day, and the window was left open to air the drying paint. The killers slit the screen in the window and wiggled into the house—“creepy crawling” was the term they used.

  According to the summary given by authorities at Manson’s 1992 parole hearing:

  Shortly before midnight on August 8, 1969, the prisoner [Manson] informed his crime partners that now is the time for helter skelter. The crime partners were directed to accompany Charles [“Tex”] Watson to carry out the orders given by the prisoner. The crime partners at the time were Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. As the crime partners were in the car getting ready to leave the area, the prisoner informed them, “You girls know what I mean,” something to which he instructed them to leave a sign. Crime partner Watson drove directly to 10050 Cielo Drive, where he stopped the car. Linda Kasabian held three knives and one gun during the trip. Watson then cut the overhead telephone wires at the scene and parked the vehicle.

  Crime partners Atkins and Krenwinkel had been in the backseat with Linda Kasabian, the passenger in the right front seat. Watson then carried some rope over the hill and to the outer premises of 10050 Cielo Drive.

  The vehicle containing victim Steven Parent approached the gate opening into the street. Watson stopped him at gunpoint and Parent stated, “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” Watson shot Parent five times and turned off the ignition of his car.

  All of the crime partners then proceeded to the house where Watson cut a window screen. Linda Kasabian acted as a lookout while another female crime partner entered the residence through an open window and admitted the other crime partners.

  Within the residence the prisoner’s crime partners, without provocation, logic, or reason, murdered Abigail Anne Folger by inflicting a total of twenty-eight multiple stab wounds on her body. Victim Voytek, count two, was killed by multiple stab wounds. A gunshot wound to his left back and multiple, forced trauma of a blunt nature to the head. Victim Sharon Tate Polanski was killed with multiple stab wounds. Victim Jay Sebring was killed by multiple stab wounds.

  Jay Sebring was actually stabbed seven times and shot once; Voytek Frykowski was shot twice, received thirteen blows to the head, and was stabbed fifty-one times; Sharon Tate was stabbed sixteen times—her unborn child, was of course, dead. Sharon and Sebring were also hung by the neck from a rafter in the house before they were killed. Written in Tate’s blood on the front door of the house was a single word: “Pigs.”

  Sharon Tate had been killed by 21-year-old Susan Atkins, nicknamed Sadie Mae Glutz. According to her own testimony, she held Tate in a headlock while the other victims were being stomped and stabbed. Then Sharon’s turn came. She begged Atkins not to kill her. Atkins testified: “She said, ‘Please let me go. All I want to do is have my baby.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Woman, I have no mercy for you.’ And I knew that I was talking to myself, not to her.”

  In jail, bragging to a cellmate, Atkins was more effusive, saying that she looked Tate in the eyes and said, “Look, bitch, I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”

  Atkins also revealed to her cellmate that she licked Sharon Tate’s blood off her fingers, “Wow, what a trip! I thought, ‘To taste death, and yet give life.’ Have you ever tasted blood? It’s warm and sticky and nice.”

  Atkins dipped a towel into Tate’s blood, and wrote “Pigs” on the front door of the house with it. Atkins said she wanted to cut Sharon’s baby out of her womb and bring it back for Charlie, but that there just was not enough time. Atkins explained to her cellmate, “You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people…I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her.”

  It would be a long time before the killers were identified. The massacre was a shocking news story, and in the subsequent days, all sorts of rumors of ritual or satanic rites were circulating in Bel Air and the Hollywood Hills. The fact that Polanski had just finished directing Rosemary’s Baby, a movie with a satanic theme, only heightened the speculation.

  The LaBianca Murders

  The next day, on August 10, at around 10:30 p.m. in Los Feliz, another upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles just east of Hollywood next to Griffith Park, police were called to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, the wealthy owners of a supermarket chain. Rosemary, age 38, was found in her bedroom, stabbed forty-one times in her back and buttocks. A lamp cord was wrapped around her neck and one of the knife blows had severed her spine. Her husband, Leno, age
44, was found downstairs in the living room, stabbed twelve times with a knife and fourteen times with a large serving fork. It was left protruding from his ample stomach. Across his abdomen, the word “War” had been crudely carved into his flesh. In his blood, the words “Death to Pigs” and “Rise” were written on the walls, and on the refrigerator door, “Helter Skelter.”

  Again, according to Manson’s parole hearing record:

  On August the 10th, 1969, the prisoner drove his crime partners to a location near the residence of victims Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. The prisoner entered the LaBianca home alone at gunpoint and tied up the victims.

  He impressed them with the statement that they would not be harmed and that a robbery was taking place. He then returned to the vehicle containing his crime partners and then directed them to enter that residence and kill the occupants. He informed them not to notify the victims that they would be killed.

  Crime partners Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, then entered the residence and the prisoner drove away from the scene. The crime partners entered the residence and in a callous manner killed Leno LaBianca by inflicting multiple stab wounds to his neck and abdomen. Rosemary LaBianca was killed by multiple stab wounds, which were inflicted to the neck and trunk [sic].

  The crime partners carved the word “war” on Leno LaBianca’s stomach with the use of a carving fork. At both of the above murder scenes, the prisoner’s crime partners used blood of their victims to write the words.