by Colin Wilson
In 1989 nursing sister Michaela Roeder was charged at Wuppertal, West Germany, with the murder of seventeen patients by injection with Catapresan, a drug which affects high blood pressure. Public prosecutor Karl-Hermann Majorowsky accused her of playing ‘mistress of life or death’ over patients in the intensive care unit of St Peter’s Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen, by her random selection of who should live or die. Twenty-eight bodies were exhumed after a nurse claimed to have seen Sister Roeder injecting a cancer patient with Catapresan. Seventeen of the corpses were found to contain traces of the drug. Newspaper reports said that even before suspicion was first aroused, Sister Roeder – who denied the murder charges – had been nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’ by her colleagues, because of the high death rate in the ward. She was alleged by police to have admitted involvement in six deaths ‘because she could not bear to see patients suffer unnecessarily’.
On 10 April 1989 Dr Alois Stacher – head of Vienna’s hospital system – told a press conference that four women nurses working at the Lainz Hospital had been charged with the multiple murder of patients aged between seventy-three and eighty-two, and a warrant issued for the arrest of a fifth nurse. He said the ‘bloody murders’, allegedly committed at intervals since 1983, totalled at least forty-nine – probably the largest number of ‘series murders’ in European history. When first interrogated, said Dr Stacher, the nurses claimed the deaths were ‘mercy killings’. He disagreed: ‘These nurses enjoyed killing, because it gave them an extraordinary power over life and death. They killed patients who had become a nuisance to them, who had angered them or who posed a special problem.’
The killing rate rose from one patient every three months to one a month and continued virtually unnoticed – until a chance remark by an off-duty nurse to a ward doctor was reported to Dr Stacher, who immediately called in the police. The nurses were alleged to have changed their modus operandi from time to time, to avoid rousing suspicion. The method most frequently used was to drown patients by forcing water down their throats whilst holding their nostrils closed. ‘This is a painful death which leaves virtually no trace,’ said Dr Stacher. ‘Water in the lungs of an elderly person is considered quite normal.’ The nurse named as leader of the death group was said to have confessed personally to murdering twenty-two patients in this way. Other methods allegedly included injection of insulin, glucose and sleeping drugs. None of the accused had been brought to trial when this book went to press.
One twentieth-century poisoner who appeared to be a straight throwback to the Anna Zwanziger type of serial killer (she regarded arsenic as her ‘truest friend’) was Englishman Graham Young. Young, who was born in 1947, yearned obsessively for publicity. His mother died when he was only a few months old, and the solitary, intelligent child grew into an adolescent odd-man-out who disliked society generally and, perversely, transferred his admiration to Hitler and the Nazis. Another of his early heroes was Dr William Palmer, the English multiple murderer who poisoned his creditors and probably his wife, his mother-in-law, and four of his children before he was hanged in the 1850s.
Graham Young began experimenting with poison in 1961 – when he was fourteen – by administering small doses of antimony tartrate to his family. His elder sister Winifred suffered considerably from what she thought to be a permanently upset stomach. In April 1962 Graham Young’s stepmother died. When his father, who was also ill and growing steadily weaker, was taken to hospital the doctors diagnosed arsenic poisoning. Fifteen-year-old Graham Young was outraged. His comment ‘How ridiculous not to be able to tell the difference between arsenic and antimony poisoning’ aroused immediate suspicion, and he was soon arrested. Vials of antimony tartrate were found on him and he was sent to Broadmoor, the asylum for criminal lunatics. While he was incarcerated there a fellow inmate died of poisoning, in mysterious circumstances.
Young was released after nine years, in February 1971. Far from being cured, his compulsion to carry on poisoning was undiminished. A few weeks after he took a job with a photographic firm at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire, head storekeeper Bob Egle began to suffer pains in the back and stomach. Mr Egle died in July 1971. Very soon so many of the staff were suffering from stomach upsets that the term ‘Bovingdon bug’ became common parlance. In October the same year another storekeeper, Fred Biggs, fell ill. On 31 October Graham Young noted in his diary ‘I have administered a fatal dose of the special compound to F’. Mr Biggs died three weeks after he was admitted to hospital, cause unknown. In November 1971 two more Bovingdon employees complained of stomach upsets, ‘pins and needles’ in their feet and found their hair was falling out. Finally a team of doctors was called in to try to identify the deadly ‘Bovingdon bug’; whereupon Graham Young, a newcomer to the firm who was forever trying to impress by his knowledge, astonished Dr Robert Hynd, the presiding Medical Officer of Health, by asking if the ‘bug’ symptoms were consistent with thallium poisoning. (Thallium, or T1, is a metallic element found in flue dust resulting from the manufacture of sulphuric acid, and causes gradual paralysis of the nervous system.)
Such a question naturally aroused suspicion, and Scotland Yard was asked if Young had a criminal record. When his Broadmoor background became known he was arrested on suspicion of murder. A subsequent search revealed his diary, complete with incriminating entries. At first Young claimed they were notes intended for a novel; but when he was found to have thallium in his possession (intended as a suicide potion if he were caught) he confessed to murdering both storekeepers, and was imprisoned for life. His sister Winifred, who had suffered for so long at his hands, told of her brother’s ‘craving for publicity, and notice’ in her book, Obsessive Poisoner. She also said he spoke of loneliness and feelings of depression when he called on her shortly before his arrest (he referred to himself as ‘Your friendly neighbourhood Frankenstein’). When she suggested he should mix more with other people, Young replied, ‘Nothing like that can help . . . You see, there’s a terrible coldness inside me.’
A number of serial killers express similar longings to be important. Some, mistaking fame for notoriety, hope to win acclaim by evading arrest while continuing to commit murder galore. Many genuinely believe they cannot be caught, like Jack the Ripper, and even if mistaken are quick to voice their surprise. Kenneth Erskine, alias The Stockwell Strangler, told the police who arrested him, ‘I wanted to be famous . . . I thought you were never going to catch me’. After he was jailed for the last time, Ted Bundy expected authors Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth to write their book1 not about his crimes, but about him: Bundy, the celebrity. Michaud overcame the problem by persuading him to speculate on ‘the nature of a person capable of doing what Bundy had been accused of doing’ – which the killer happily did.
Paul John Knowles, a young, red-headed American ex-convict who had spent half his adult life in jail, was a rapist and serial killer who murdered at least eighteen people in the four months before he was arrested for the last time, in November 1974. He was then twenty-eight. Sandy Fawkes, a visiting British woman journalist who by chance met Knowles before he was arrested and covered the courtroom hearing (see here), recognised this longing to be somebody in Knowles’ evident pride on being interviewed by the press. ‘He was having his hour of glory . . . He was already being referred to as the most heinous killer in history.’ His hour of glory, as it transpired, was no more than that – almost literally. As Knowles was being transferred the next day to a maximum-security jail, he succeeded in picking the lock on his handcuffs and tried to steal the escorting sheriff’s gun. FBI agent Ron Angel, however, was quicker on the draw – and shot Knowles dead.
Regardless of the type of serial killer concerned, case histories show that most prefer to work alone. There are a number of instances of convicted serial killers working in pairs, but these are a minority group and usually consist of dominant leader and accomplice. As with the loners, serial killers who work in pairs are usually male: the man-woman team, while not unknown, is rare. A s
erial killer ‘pack’ is rarest of all; these too usually have a dominant leader (like Manson). The alleged Lainz Hospital medical ‘pack’ is unique, in that all its five first-reported members were female. The eight members of the Manson gang convicted of the 1969 murders comprised four of each sex: pack leader Manson, Bruce Davis, Clem Grogan and Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, plus females Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme and Leslie van Houten. No charges were brought against the other two women member of the ‘Family’ – Mary Brunner and Linda Kasabian – who turned state evidence. On the premise that more than two serial killers constitutes a ‘pack’, the Texan homosexual murderer Dean Corll and his two accomplices, teenagers Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, rate among the more notorious. Together they took part in the torture, homosexual rape and murder of some twenty-seven youths in the 1970s. Finally, after Corll ordered Henley to rape and kill a girl of fifteen while Corll sodomised and murdered a male teenager, Henley refused and shot Corll instead. He and Brooks were later imprisoned for life for their part in the previous murders.
Almost all known instances of serial killers working in pairs have occurred in the United States. They include Patrick Kearney and David Hill, alias ‘The Trashbag Killers’, who murdered thirty homosexuals in Southern California in the late 1970s and put their bodies out for collection in bags, as if they were normal household refuse. Ex-convicts Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were arrested in Texas in 1983 after a string of murders, of which Lucas was found guilty of eleven. How many Lucas alone may have committed can only be guesswork: he killed for the first time at fifteen, and was fifty-one when finally arrested in 1983. Whilst in custody he ‘confessed’ to more than three hundred murders, but withdrew the ‘confession’ later. (In any event it was worthless: like so many serial killers, Lucas was found to be a compulsive liar.)
Also in the 1980s Vietnam veteran Leonard Lake and his accomplice, Charles Ng, abducted three women and kept them as their ‘sex slaves’ in a specially-built torture chamber beneath their cabin near Wisleyville, in Calaveras County, California. The three women were murdered when their captors finally tired of them, as were the two young children abducted with their ‘sex slave’ mothers. Seven adult males who were subsequently lured to the cabin were also murdered, robbed and buried there.
Two murderers who formed a rare ‘mixed’ pair of serial killers were British – Ian Brady and his mistress Myra Hindley, alias ‘The Moors Murderers’. In 1966 they were jointly charged with three murders, two of them the murders of children aged ten and twelve respectively. A unique feature of their trial was that Brady and Hindley stood in a dock protected by bulletproof glass, lest an attempt be made on their lives (there was widespread public outrage over the child murders). Discreetly, the police described the screen as a ‘draught excluder’. Brady was found guilty of all three murders, Hindley of two, and of being an accessory to the third. For both, the timing of the trial was all-important: the death penalty for murder had been abolished just two months earlier.
The numbers of victims murdered by some lone serial killers are occasionally so large that the normal mind reels. The grim numerical record is thought to be held by a thirty-one-year-old Ecuadoran peasant, Pedro Alonzo Lopez. Lopez targeted young, pre-pubescent girls. Four makeshift graves were disturbed in April 1980 when a river overflowed its banks near Ambato (south of the capital Quito, in central Ecuador), and the bodies floated free to raise the alarm. Lopez was arrested shortly afterwards as he tried unsuccessfully to abduct a girl of eleven. He later confessed to killing ‘about’ three hundred and fifty, during the two previous years. In 1986 – again in Ecuador, this time in Quito itself – a transient Colombian serial killer named Daniel Camargo Barbosa confessed to murdering seventy-two girls a year earlier, and was jailed for sixteen years (reportedly the maximum penalty under the law).
When set against such leviathan totals, the numbers of victims regularly attributed to lone serial killers elsewhere sound almost respectably few. In fact, they serve only to underline how dangerous the species is. Ted Bundy admitted to twenty-three murders before he was executed in 1989 in ‘Old Sparky’ – criminalese for the electric chair in the state penitentiary at Starke, in Florida. Most police investigators believe Bundy was ‘good’ for half as many again, probably thirty-four murders. John Wayne Gacy, the homosexual serial killer from Chicago, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1980 for strangling thirty-three youths. Charles Manson, who was sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) for nine murders committed in the summer of 1969, privately admitted to thirty-five. When he first heard this Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson and his ‘Family’, reckoned such a total to be ‘sick boasting’: with hindsight, however, he came to think Manson guilty of understatement.
In the 1980s, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported the pending trial of a man in Vitebsk, Byelorussia (or ‘White Russia’, some three hundred and fifty miles west of Moscow), charged with murdering thirty-three women. The Tass report was a rare admission, which served to underline the shock effect of multiple murder in communist Russia which, in the days before glasnost, censored virtually every public reference to violent crime in the USSR. The numbers of victims known to have been murdered by convicted British and European serial killers tend to be lower than those of their American or Russian counterparts, if equally alarming in the context of lower national average homicide rates. Vacher, the French Ripper, murdered fourteen people. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, took thirteen lives. Peter Kürten, the Monster of Düsseldorf, who terrorised the Rhineland in the late 1920s (and is regarded by many as second only to the Ripper himself in terms of sexually sadistic brutality), was executed for nine murders, although he was probably guilty of more. Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, was convicted of seven murders. Irish-born John Duffy, ex-railwayman and long-term rapist turned serial killer, stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1988 charged with three murders, multiple rape and other offences. Duffy was found guilty of two of the murders, and five cases of rape: the judge described him as a ‘predatory animal’, and sentenced him to seven terms of life imprisonment.
There are few set rules governing the criminal behaviour of all serial killers. Most commit murder – and will continue to commit murder again and again, for as long as they remain free – whenever a compulsive urge, an uncontainable frenzy temporarily dormant within them, suddenly erupts and boils over. From that moment on the serial killer becomes every whit as lethal as a hired assassin, bent on killing his targeted victim (usually a total stranger) as soon as opportunity presents itself. Whatever potential risk may be involved is unlikely to serve as a deterrent. For many serial killers the risk will have been calculated when devising their modus operandi; for others, the greater an element of risk incurred, the greater the ‘high’ they attain from the act of killing.
Once in the thrall of this frenzy, the pent-up desires now unleashed will be every bit as compelling, say, as the drug addict’s need of a ‘fix’. The difference is that this need can be assuaged only by murder, all too often the murder of a complete stranger; a type of person known only to the killer himself, since both the type of victim and the way in which he or she will be put to death will have been conceived in fantasy, perhaps years before they meet. Not until the fantasy-inspired murder has run its course – possibly including violent assault, abduction, rape, torture and/or mutilation – will the frenzy abate, and a ‘cooling-off’ period set in.
What causes this indeterminate, emotional metamorphosis is uncertain. It may be remorse, or self-disgust even, once the enormity of the offence is fully realised. Or it may simply be a passing surfeit of murder and mayhem, with their inevitable inner tensions. Whatever its mainspring, this unique, emotional break in the murder cycle sets the serial killer apart from all other multiple murderers. Dr James Dobson, the American psychologist who spoke at length with Ted Bundy on the eve of Bundy’s execution in 1989, was told by B
undy that he felt remorse only once – after the abduction, rape and murder of his first victim, student Lynda Ann Healy. ‘Then the sex frenzy overcame him, and he killed again: and as each crime passed, he became de-sensitised.’
The ‘triggering factor’ which drives the serial killer to commit murder is almost endless in its variety, yet in the context of the violence of the crime often such a trivial thing. The type of victim he kills is always in the mind: conceived in fantasy, possibly years beforehand and uneasily dormant since. The serial murderer himself is often an ‘underachiever’, an intelligent person (not an Einstein, but still of obvious promise); yet for some reason the potential has never been realised. Now, say, he has been sacked. To his mind, it will always be unfairly; and all the deep-seated hostility he harbours against society now erupts. He seeks out his symbolic victim – and kills. Another serial killer may have a ‘dominant female’ stress problem. After a blazing row with his wife/partner/mother he storms out, has a few drinks (or takes drugs), and ends up murdering a ‘stranger’ victim of opportunity: the classic transferred-aggression syndrome. Ed Kemper, an unmarried Californian serial killer, lived – and quarrelled incessantly with – his divorced, dominant mother. His practice was to behead, and later sexually assault, pretty students (the type of girl his mother told him he would never be able to date). After one row too many, Kemper turned on his mother – and decapitated her. With some serial killers, the triggering factor may be partly self-induced. Bundy, for example, blamed pornography for feeding his ‘sick obsessions’. Medical serial killers, on the other hand, crave the ultimate power (over life and death); and once tasted, their need of it becomes addictive.