In 1995, he and Leigh Ann were married. Again he started acting strange, suffering deep depressions and paranoid delusions. He lost a big settlement from his wife’s death through day trading and ended up owing money instead of making it. After losing $105,000 in a single month, he decided the time had come to act.
He woke early on July 27, 1999, and bludgeoned Leigh Ann to death in her bed. The next night, he did the same to Matthew and Mychelle. He covered them with blankets and left notes on their bodies, and on July 29 he went to the downtown offices of the company he worked for, the All-Tech Investment Group. He chatted with his coworkers for a while, then said, “I hope this doesn’t ruin your trading day,” pulled out two pistols, and started shooting. After killing four people in one building, he calmly walked through the police lines into another building and opened fire again, killing five more. Then he passed through the police yet again and vanished.
The police eventually searched for Barton at his home and found the bodies of his family members. In a note Barton left behind, he denied responsibility for the deaths of his first wife and her mother.
An intensive manhunt ensued. Five hours later, Barton threatened a young girl. She ran away from him and called for help, and once more the police were on his trail. When his van was spotted, the police followed him into a gas station in Acworth, Georgia. Surrounded, Barton ducked back into the van and shot himself, elevating that day’s total to thirteen dead at his hands. We will probably never know if he also murdered his first wife and his mother-in-law. But the real question that will always remain is this: Did his second wife know whether he had killed his first wife?
ALTHOUGH THIS FINAL pair has yet to merit a mention on Criminal Minds, it seems remiss to close out a chapter on families killing together, and family annihilators, without at least a passing reference to a pair of brothers who famously teamed up to murder their parents.
On the night of August 20, 1989, film and music executive Jose Menendez and his wife, Kitty, were dozing in the family room of their Beverly Hills mansion, with the James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me playing on their TV. Two men came into the room bearing 12-gauge shotguns. One fired two shots at Jose, then held the barrel to Jose’s head and finished him off. The commotion woke Kitty, who tried to run. A shotgun blast savaged her leg and knocked her down. She tried to get up, but the blasts kept coming. Before it was over, Kitty had been shot ten times at close range. Finally, each victim’s kneecaps were maimed, gangland style, presumably to make the whole event look like an organized-crime hit.
A few weeks earlier, Kitty had confessed to her sons’ psychotherapist—who was treating them as part of their sentence for some burglaries they’d been convicted of—that she feared her two sons were psychopaths.
Before the year was out, the sons, Lyle and Erik, had spent more than a million dollars of their inheritance. Erik, eighteen, confessed the double homicide to the brothers’ psychotherapist, who initially kept quiet about it even though Lyle, twenty-one, threatened him, thereby technically releasing the therapist from the bond of doctor-patient privilege. The doctor’s girlfriend overheard one of their sessions, however, and she went to the police, fearing for her boyfriend’s safety. When the police arrived with arrest warrants, the doctor told them everything.
The Menendez brothers had been worried that their father would cut them out of his will. They’d been in trouble for various crimes, and relations were tense. They claimed—although there was no independent verification—that their parents had abused and molested them all their lives. Erik was in Israel when Lyle was arrested, but when Erik flew back to Los Angeles, the detectives met him at the airport.
Their first trials ended with hung juries, but the brothers were tried again, found guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances and conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to life in prison, where they remain to this day.
8
The Fairer Sex
SO FAR WE’ VE BEEN discussing male criminals almost exclusively, except for those women who act as part of a couple or a family. The reason for this is simple: most serial killers and mass murderers are men. Women tend to murder people they know, family members or acquaintances, and they ’re more likely to choose poison over other weapons. Most is not the same as all, however, and the balance depicted on Criminal Minds is pretty close to the balance in real life.
One of the show’s notable exceptions is Megan Kane, the high-priced call girl in the episode “Pleasure Is My Business” (416). Megan is not exactly the fictional cliché of the hooker with a heart of gold, but she does focus her murderous impulses on men who avoid—as her father avoided—their parental responsibilities.
Referenced in that episode, as well as in another with a female unsub, “Jones” (218), is a hooker whose heart was anything but gold—and who, in her professional life, was anything but high-priced.
TWO YOUNG MEN looking for scrap metal along I-95 in Volusia County, Florida, made an entirely different sort of discovery on December 13, 1989. They came across a male body, wrapped in a carpet runner. The victim, shot three times in the chest with a .22, was identified as Richard Mallory of Clearwater, who was last seen thirteen days earlier. Mallory owned an electronics repair business, but he didn’t have any regular employees, so when he vanished, no one paid much attention. He had a habit of vanishing anyway, taking off on liquor-and-sex binges for days at a time. He had a fondness for booze, pornography, strippers, and hookers. The police had few clues, and the case went cold in a hurry.
Six months later, another corpse turned up. This one, a nude man identified as David Spears, had been missing for a couple of weeks after vanishing during a drive to Orlando.
A few days later, the authorities found yet another dead man, shot nine times with a .22. Eventually identified as Charles Carskaddon, he was a rodeo worker.
On July 4, 1990, a car with two women in it ran off the road near Orange Springs, Florida. A witness reported that the two women got out, screaming and cursing at each other, and asked the witness not to call the police. They tried to get the car going again, but the damage was considerable, and they soon abandoned it and set off on foot. The sheriff’s deputies were able to identify the car as belonging to Peter Siems, who had been missing since June 7. His body has never been found.
Troy Burress disappeared on July 30 and turned up five days later. He had been killed by two bullets from a .22.
Dick Humphreys, a retired air force officer and a onetime police chief, celebrated his thirty-fifth wedding anniversary on September 10, vanished on September 11, and was found on September 12. He had been shot seven times with a .22.
More than a month passed before the nude body of Walter Gino Antonio, a trucker and a reserve police officer, was found. He had been shot four times with a .22.
Although these murders took place in different jurisdictions over many months, the similarities did not go unnoticed. Steve Binegar of the Marion County Sheriff ’s Criminal Investigation Division figured that the men would not have picked up hitchhikers, so the killer had to be someone they would have seen as nonthreatening. He suspected the two women who had been driving Peter Siems’s stolen car, and he had the media run sketches of them.
By mid-December, many people had reported what appeared to be the same two women to police, although the names varied considerably. One of them was probably Tyria or Ty Moore; the other was Lee, or Lee Blahovec, or Susan Blahovec. They were a couple, and Lee, or Susan, was a prostitute. The authorities in Harbor Oaks, Florida, knew Blahovec as Cammie Marsh Green. She also used the aliases Sandra Kretsch and Lori Grody. Cammie Marsh Green had pawned items that had belonged to David Spears and Richard Mallory, and a palm print found in Peter Siems’s car matched Lori Grody. All of these names were aliases used by Aileen Wuornos.
Wuornos’s story had a hard beginning. Born Aileen Carol Pittman on February 29, 1956, she, like many serial killers, was given up by her birth mother. Her maternal grandparents, Lauri and Brit
ta Wuornos, adopted Aileen and her older brother, Keith, in 1960. She never met her father, a psychopathic child molester who had spent time in mental hospitals and later hanged himself in prison. Wuornos said that her grandfather and adoptive father, Lauri, physically and sexually abused her from a young age and that her grandmother and adoptive mother, Britta, was an abusive alcoholic.
Wuornos didn’t know that they weren’t her birth parents until she was twelve. By the time she was fourteen, Wuornos had had multiple sexual partners, including her brother, according to her claims, and was pregnant. She went to a home for unwed mothers and gave birth to a boy, whom she put up for adoption.
That year, Britta Wuornos died. Within the next few years, Aileen ran away from home and took up prostitution to support herself. Soon her brother, Keith, died of throat cancer, and Lauri committed suicide. Wuornos’s life looked as if it might turn around when a wealthy sixty-nine-year-old man married her, but she was already out of control, and the marriage was quickly annulled.
In “Doubt,” after shutting down a college campus, the BAU team creates a detailed profile of their unsub, but when the killings on campus continue after they take a suspect into custody, the agents begin to doubt themselves.
With her face severely scarred from burns she had suffered in a childhood accident, Wuornos could never have been the kind of high-end call girl seen in “Pleasure Is My Business.” Instead, she plied her trade at cheap motels and low-end bars. She abused drugs and alcohol, and in addition to hooking, she relied on theft, forgery, and armed robbery to make ends meet. In 1986, she met Tyria Moore in a gay bar in Daytona, and they fell in love. Their relationship was troubled, but although the romance died off, they remained friends and traveling companions.
After Wuornos was arrested she confessed to the murders but insisted that Moore was innocent. Wuornos had killed the men, she said, because they had threatened her. She’d been raped several times on the job, and she’d gotten tired of it. After that, whenever a man started to rape or threaten her, she responded with violence. All of the killings had been done in self-defense, she insisted. But the more times she told the story, the more it changed; each time she cast herself in a better light, as the victim rather than the perpetrator of the crimes.
Wuornos was tried and convicted of Richard Mallory’s murder even though she continued to claim self-defense throughout the trial. She received her first death sentence for that one. To the charges of the murders of David Spears, Troy Burress, and Dick Humphreys, she pleaded no contest, and she pleaded guilty to the murders of Charles Carskaddon and Walter Gino Antonio, earning six death sentences altogether.
No charges were ever brought in the Peter Siems case. After the Mallory trial was over, evidence emerged that Mallory had served ten years in prison for violent sexual attacks. A new trial for Wuornos was denied, despite this new twist that might have convinced jurors that her first murder had, in fact, been self-defense. She had recanted her claims of self-defense in the other cases.
Eventually Wuornos chose to fire her attorneys and cease her appeals. “I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again,” she wrote to Florida’s Supreme Court. She was allowed to choose her method of execution and picked lethal injection over the electric chair. Her last words, on October 9, 2002, were, “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother-ship and all. I’ll be back.”
MORE TYPICAL of female serial killers was Dorothea Puente, who ran a boardinghouse in Sacramento, California—an occupation she took up after the law shut down her brothel. When the rent she collected wasn’t enough to maintain the lifestyle to which she aspired, she took to killing her boarders, many of whom were elderly and disabled, and then she continued to cash their Social Security checks.
Puente buried seven bodies in her yard, but officials believe that she killed at least nine people. Her crimes were revealed when an investigation into a missing tenant turned up bodies buried in the yard. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole on December 10, 1993, when she was sixty-four years old.
THE QUEEN of female killers—and perhaps the most prolific serial killer in history, of either sex—was Countess Erzsébet Báthory of Transylvania. Known as Elizabeth Báthory in the United States, she is believed to have tortured and killed at least 650 girls and young women between 1585 and 1610, with the help of four servants.
Her victims were originally servant girls, but when that crop began to run out, she turned to lesser aristocrats. After the testimony of the participating servants and some survivors, Báthory was convicted of eighty murders and believed to be responsible for at least three hundred.
The figure of 650 comes from her own diaries, in which she kept track of her victims. She was imprisoned for life, walled up in her own rooms, where she died on an unknown date in 1613 or 1614. Given the nature of her crimes, Báthory was clearly a sexually sadistic serial killer of the highest order, and her station in life allowed her to live out her wildest fantasies.
FEMALE KILLER Chloe Kelcher, in the episode “The Angel Maker” (402), is said to suffer from hybristophilia, a state in which one becomes sexually aroused by the knowledge that a partner has committed a violent act. Perhaps the most infamous hybristophiliac of modern times is Veronica Lynn Compton.
In June 1980, Veronica Compton, then twenty-three, was a writer and a would-be actress with a serial-killer obsession. She contacted Kenneth Bianchi while he was in prison awaiting trial as one of the Hillside Stranglers, and she described to him a play she was writing called The Mutilated Cutter, about a female serial killer. She wanted a real serial killer’s take on the material.
Their correspondence reveals that Compton had an unhealthy fascination with rape, mutilation, murder, and necrophilia—just Bianchi’s kind of pen pal. They rapidly developed a romantic relationship, and Bianchi suggested a desperate defense ploy to which Compton readily agreed. She visited him in prison, and he gave her a book with part of a rubber glove pressed between the pages. Inside the glove was some of his semen. She flew to Bellingham, Washington, where he had been arrested for a pair of murders, with the plan of murdering another woman and planting Bianchi’s semen on the corpse. This would, Bianchi hoped, make the police believe that they had the wrong man in custody and that the real rapist-murderer was still on the loose.
In a fictional variation on this idea, Anna Begley, a student in the episode “Doubt” (301), attacks and stabs a girl, copying the MO of the already-arrested Nathan Tubbs, in order to win Tubbs’s release.
Compton managed to lure a woman to a motel room, but when she tried to strangle her victim, the woman overpowered her and ran away, then reported the attack to the police. Compton escaped and returned to California, but she made a scene when she landed at the San Francisco airport that brought her to the attention of the authorities.
Although Compton had failed in her murder attempt, she wrote a letter to Bellingham officials anyway, claiming that the attack proved that the killer was still at large. With the victim’s description, the California postmark on the letter, and pictures from the airport scene, the police were able to quickly identify Compton and arrest her. In jail in Washington for attempted murder, she was no longer any use to Bianchi, but he continued writing to her until it was more than obvious that she had lost interest in him.
A new serial killer had earned her fascination, and she began corresponding with him: Sunset Strip Murderer Doug Clark, formerly romantically linked to Carol Bundy. Compton soon took Bundy’s place in Clark’s heart, and the two shared an intense romance through the U.S. mail. As a valentine, Clark sent Compton a photo of himself posed with a headless female corpse. Romance flared in Compton’s heart, and she wrote to him, “I take out my straight razor and with one quick stroke I slit the veins in the crook of your arm. Your blood spurts out and spits atop my swelled breasts. Then later that night we cuddle in each other’s arms before the fireplac
e and dress each others wounds with kisses and loving caresses.”
Compton escaped from prison in 1988, but was recaptured. She was finally released in 2003. After her release, she married a college professor she had met and seduced in prison. She wrote and self-published a book in 2002 called Eating the Ashes, about her experiences in the penal system.
9
The Helpless Ones
AS HEINOUS AS THE ABDUCTIONS, rapes, and murders of adults are, there’s something particularly chilling when the same crimes are committed against children, the most helpless among us. A man or a woman who is victimized at least has a fighting chance of surviving and, having survived, of overcoming the mental and emotional trauma. But a child victim, even if he or she survives, faces an entire life scarred by the experience.
On Criminal Minds, as in real life, children can be both victims and perpetrators of crimes. In the episode “What Fresh Hell?” (112), eleven-year-old Billie Copeland is the victim of stranger abduction, and this serves as the focal point for a discussion of various child victims.
ONE OF THE CHILDREN mentioned in “What Fresh Hell?” is Polly Hannah Klaas, who is also referred to in the episode “Seven Seconds” (305). Twelve-year-old Polly was having a slumber party on October 1, 1993, when a man entered her bedroom with a knife. Insisting that he was “just doing this for the money,” he tied up the three girls, put pillowcases over their heads, and left with Polly. One of the girls freed herself and woke Polly’s mother, Eve Nichol. Nichol was separated from her second husband at the time, and she and Polly lived with Polly’s half-sister in Petaluma, California. Nichol dialed 911 immediately, kicking off a search that would include terrible missteps.
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