The twelve true crime stories in this book will keep you riveted as you turn the pages, but they will probably also leave you with more questions than answers. For instance, you will be left pondering how two brothers from the same family could disappear with no trace in similar circumstances over ten years apart. You will also wonder how two women with the same first and last names, but with no personal connections, could be murdered within the same week in the same city. The examination of a number of true crime murder cases that went cold, but were later solved through scientific advances, will also keep you intrigued and reading.
Open the pages of this book, if you dare, to read some of the most bizarre cases of disappearances, mistaken identity, and true murder. Some of the cases will disturb and anger you, but make no mistake, you will want to keep reading!
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The making of a serial killer
“I was born with the devil in me,” said H.H. Holmes, who in 1893 took advantage of the World’s Fair – and the extra room he rented out in his Chicago mansion – to kill at least 27 people without attracting much attention.
“I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since,” Holmes said.
The idea of “I can’t help it” is one of the hallmarks of many serial killers, along with an unwillingness to accept responsibility for their actions and a refusal to acknowledge that they themselves used free will to do their dreadful deeds.
“Yes, I did it, but I’m a sick man and can’t be judged by the standards of other men,” said Juan Corona, who killed 25 migrant workers in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, burying them in the very fruit orchards where they’d hoped to build a better life for their families.
Dennis Rader, who called himself the BTK Killer (Bind, Torture, Kill) also blamed some unknown facet to his personality, something he called Factor X, for his casual ability to kill one family, then go home to his own, where he was a devoted family man.
“When this monster entered my brain, I will never know, but it is here to stay. How does one cure himself? I can’t stop it, the monster goes on, and hurts me as well as society. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t,” said Rader, who said he realized he was different than the other kids before he entered high school. “I actually think I may be possessed with demons.”
But again, he blamed others for not stopping him from making his first murderous move.
“You know, at some point in time, someone should have picked something up from me and identified it,” he later said.
Rader was not the only serial killer to place the blame far away from himself.
William Bonin actually took offense when a judge called him “sadistic and guilty of monstrous criminal conduct.”
“I don’t think he had any right to say that to me,” Bonin later whined. “I couldn’t help myself. It’s not my fault I killed those boys.”
It leaves us always asking why
For those of us who are not serial killers, the questions of why and how almost always come to mind, so ill equipped are we to understand the concept of murder on such a vast scale.
“Some nights I’d lie awake asking myself, ‘Who the hell is this BTK?’” said FBI profiler John Douglas, who worked the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico before writing several best-selling books, including “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” and “Obsession: The FBI’s Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back.”
The questions were never far from his mind - “What makes a guy like this do what he does? What makes him tick?” – and it’s the kind of thing that keeps profilers and police up at night, worrying, wondering and waiting for answers that are not always so easily forthcoming.
Another leader into the study of madmen, the late FBI profiler Robert Ressler - who coined the terms serial killer as well as criminal profiling – also spent sleepless nights trying to piece together a portrait of many a killer, something that psychiatrist James Brussel did almost unfailingly well in 1940, when a pipe bomb killer enraged at Con Edison was terrorizing New York City.
(Brussel told police what the killer would be wearing when they arrested him, and although he was caught at home late at night, wearing his pajamas, when police asked him to dress, he emerged from his room wearing a double-breasted suit, exactly as Brussel had predicted.)
“What is this force that takes a hold of a person and pushes them over the edge?” wondered Ressler, who interviewed scores of killers over the course of his illustrious career.
In an effort to infiltrate the minds of serial killers, Douglas and Ressler embarked on a mission to interview some of the most deranged serial killers in the country, starting their journey in California, which “has always had more than its share of weird and spectacular crimes,” Douglas said.
In their search for a pattern, they determined that there are essential two types of serial killers: organized and disorganized.
Organized killers
Organized killers were revealed through their crime scenes, which were neat, controlled and meticulous, with effort taken both in the crime and with their victims. Organized killers also take care to leave behind few clues once they’re done.
Dean Corll was an organized serial killer. He tortured his victims overnight, carefully collecting blood and bodily fluids on a sheet of plastic before rolling them up and burying them and their possessions, most beneath the floor of a boat shed he’d rented, going there late at night under the cover of darkness.
Disorganized killers
On the flip side of the coin, disorganized killers grab their victims indiscriminately, or act on the spur of the moment, allowing victims to collect evidence beneath their fingernails when they fight back and oftentimes leaving behind numerous clues including weapons.
“The disorganized killer has no idea of, or interest in, the personalities of his victims,” Ressler wrote in his book “Whoever Fights Monsters,” one of several detailing his work as a criminal profiler. “He does not want to know who they are, and many times takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them.”
Cary Stayner – also known as the Yosemite Killer – became a disorganized killer during his last murder, which occurred on the fly when he was unable to resist a pretty park educator.
Lucky for other young women in the picturesque park, he left behind a wide range of clues, including four unmatched tire tracks from his aging 1979 International Scout.
“The crime scene is presumed to reflect the murderer’s behavior and personality in much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner’s character,” Douglas and Ressler later wrote, expanding on their findings as they continued their interview sessions.
Serial killers think they’re unique – but they’re not
Dr. Helen Morrison – a longtime fixture in the study of serial killers who keeps clown killer John Wayne Gacy’s brain in her basement (
after Gacy’s execution she sent the brain away for an analysis that proved it to be completely normal) – said that at their core, most serial killers are essentially the same.
While psychologists still haven’t determined the motives behind what drives serial killers to murder, there are certain characteristics they have in common, said Morrison, who has studied or interviewed scores of serial killers and wrote about her experiences in “My Life Among the Serial Killers.”
Most often men, serial killers tend to be talkative hypochondriacs who develop a remorseless addiction to the brutality of murder.
Too, they are able to see their victims as inanimate objects, playthings, of you will, around simply for their amusement.
Empathy? Not on your life.
“They have no appreciation for the absolute agony and terror and fear that the victim is demonstrating,” said Morrison. “They just see the object in front of them. A serial murderer has no feelings. Serial killers have no motives. They kill only to kill an object.”
In doing so, they satisfy their urges, and quiet the tumultuous turmoil inside of them.
“You say to yourself, ‘How could anybody do this to another human being?’” Morrison said. “Then you realize they don’t see them as humans. To them, it’s like pulling the wings off a fly or the legs off a daddy longlegs.... You just want to see what happens. It's the most base experiment.”
Nature vs. nurture?
For many serial killers, the desire to kill is as innate at their hair or eye color, and out of control, but most experts say that childhood trauma is an experience shared by them all.
In 1990, Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman conducted a study of serial killers behind bars and found that childhood problems were the most influential factors that led serial killers down their particular path of death and destruction.
Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler – who coined the terms serial killer and criminal profiling – goes so far as to say that 100 percent of all serial killers experienced childhoods that were not filled with happy memories of camping trips or fishing on the lake.
According to Ressler, of all the serial killers he interviewed or studied, each had suffered some form of abuse as a child - either sexual, physical or emotional abuse, neglect or rejection by parents or humiliation, including instances that occurred at school.
For those who are already hovering psychologically on edge due to unfortunate genetics, such events become focal points that drive a killer to act on seemingly insane instincts.
Because there is often no solid family unit – parents are missing or more focused on drugs and alcohol, sexual abuse goes unnoticed, physical abuse is commonplace – the child’s development becomes stunted, and they can either develop deep-seeded rage or create for themselves a fantasy world where everything is perfect, and they are essentially the kings of their self-made castle.
That was the world of Jeffrey Dahmer, who recognized his need for control much later, after hours spent in analysis where he learned the impact of a sexual assault as a child as well as his parents’ messy, rage-filled divorce.
“After I left the home, that’s when I started wanting to create my own little world, where I was the one who had complete control,” Dahmer said. “I just took it way too far.”
Dahmer’s experiences suggest that psychopathic behavior likely develops in childhood, when due to neglect and abuse, children revert to a place of fantasy, a world where the victimization of the child shifts toward others.
“The child becomes sociopathic because the normal development of the concepts of right and wrong and empathy towards others is retarded because the child’s emotional and social development occurs within his self-centered fantasies. A person can do no wrong in his own world and the pain of others is of no consequence when the purpose of the fantasy world is to satisfy the needs of one person,” according to one expert.
As the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred, fantasies that on their own are harmless become real, and monsters like Dean Corll find themselves strapping young boys down to a wooden board, raping them, torturing them and listening to them scream, treating the act like little more than a dissociative art project that ends in murder.
Going inside the mind: Psychopathy and other mental illnesses
While not all psychopaths are serial killers – many compulsive killers do feel some sense of remorse, such as Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway did when he cried in court after one victim’s father offered Ridgeway his forgiveness – those who are, Morrison said, are unable to feel a speck of empathy for their victims.
Their focus is entirely on themselves and the power they are able to assert over others, especially so in the case of a psychopath.
Psychopaths are charming – think Ted Bundy, who had no trouble luring young women into his car by eliciting sympathy with a faked injury – and have the skills to easily manipulate their victims, or in some cases, their accomplices.
Dean Corll was called a Svengali – a name taken from a fictional character in George du Maurier’s 1895 novel “Trilby” who seduces, dominates and exploits the main character, a young girl – for being able to enlist the help of several neighborhood boys who procured his youthful male victims without remorse, even when the teens were their friends.
Some specific traits of serial killers, determined through years of profiling, include:
Smooth talking but insincere. Ted Bundy was a charmer, the kind of guy that made it easy for people to be swept into his web. “I liked him immediately, but people like Ted can fool you completely,” said Ann Rule, author of the best-selling “Stranger Beside Me,” about her experiences with Bundy, a man she considered a friend. “I’d been a cop, had all that psychology — but his mask was perfect. I say that long acquaintance can help you know someone. But you can never be really sure. Scary.”
Egocentric and grandiose. Jack the Ripper thought the world of himself, and felt he would outsmart police, so much so that he sent letters taunting the London officers. “Dear Boss,” he wrote, “I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the police officers … My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.”
Lack of remorse or guilt. Joel Rifkin was filled with self-pity after he was convicted of killing and dismembering at least nine women. He called his conviction a tragedy, but later, in prison, he got into an argument with mass murderer Colin Ferguson over whose killing spree was more important, and when Ferguson taunted him for only killing women, Rifkin said, “Yeah, but I had more victims.”
Lack of empathy. Andrei Chikatilo, who feasted on bits of genitalia both male and female after his kills, thought nothing of taking a life, no matter how torturous it was for his victims. “The whole thing - the cries, the blood, the agony - gave me relaxation and a certain pleasure,” he said.
Deceitful and manipulative. John Wayne Gacy refused to take responsibility for the 28 boys buried beneath his house, even though he also once said that clowns can get away with murder. “I think after 14 years under truth serum had I committed the crime I would have known it,” said the man the neighbors all claimed to like. “There’s got to be something that would… would click in my mind. I’ve had photos of 21 of the victims and I’ve looked at them all over the years here and I’ve never recognized anyone of them.”
Shallow emotions. German serial killer Rudolph Pliel, c
onvicted of killing 10 people and later took his own life in prison, compared his “hobby” of murder to playing cards, and later told police, “What I did is not such a great harm, with all these surplus women nowadays. Anyway, I had a good time.”
Impulsive. Tommy Lynn Sells, who claimed responsibility for dozens of murders throughout the Midwest and South, saw a woman at a convenience store and followed her home, an impulse he was unable to control. He waited until the house went dark, then “I went into this house. I go to the first bedroom I see...I don’t know whose room it is and, and, and, and I start stabbing.” The victim was the woman’s young son.
Poor behavior controls. “I wished I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness,” said UK killer Dennis Nilsen, who killed at least 12 young men via strangulation, then bathed and dressed their bodies before disposing of them, often by burning them.
Need for excitement. For Albert Fish - a masochistic killer with a side of sadism that included sending a letter to the mother of one of his victims, describing in detail how he cut, cooked and ate her daughter - even the idea of his own death was one he found particularly thrilling. “Going to the electric chair will be the supreme thrill of my life,” he said.
Lack of responsibility. “I see myself more as a victim rather than a perpetrator,” said Gacy, in a rare moment of admitting the murders. “I was cheated out of my childhood. I should never have been convicted of anything more serious than running a cemetery without a license. They were just a bunch of worthless little queers and punks.”
Early behavior problems. “When I was a boy I never had a friend in the world,” said German serial killer Heinrich Pommerencke, who began raping and murdering girls as a teen.
Richard Cottingham: The True Story of The Torso Killer: Historical Serial Killers and Murderers (True Crime by Evil Killers Book 20) Page 9