by Colin Wilson
No matter what emotion may spark off – or terminate – the unique ‘cooling-off’ period, its duration can vary considerably in the same serial killer, from one murder to the next: from an hour, say, to a day, a week, months possibly and even years. We see this clearly in the irregular timing of the sixteen murders attributed to the Italian serial killer who became known as ‘The Monster of Florence’ (Il Mostro), finally identified in 1993 as a 69-year-old farm labourer named Pietro Pacciani. ‘The Monster’ haunted lovers’ lanes and holiday camp sites near the Tuscan capital in late summer and autumn. He played Peeping Tom before shooting the couple – the man first, then raping and mutilating the woman in Ripper style – eight couples in all, in 1968, 1974, 1981 (twice), 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985. Like Jack the Ripper, he sent body parts to taunt the police. When a psychiatrist suggested that Il Mostro was a mother’s boy because he always left the breasts intact, he sent the left breast of his next victim to the investigating magistrate.
Pacciani was arrested in January 1993 through a phone tip-off. A bullet embedded in a post in his garden proved to be fired from the murder weapon, a Beretta, and some of the victims’ belongings were allegedly found in his home. Pacciani had already spent six years in prison for murdering a girlfriend’s lover in 1951, and forcing her to have sex beside the corpse. The prosecution painted Pacciani as a brutal man who ‘treated his family like beasts’ and forced incest on his two daughters.
But although sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994, he was freed on appeal in February 1996. The public prosecutor, Piero Tony, then tried to reopen the case, alleging that he had a confession from a man he believed to be Pacciani’s accomplice in the crimes, Mario Vanni. Four witnesses who declined to be named (but were called by the prosecutor alpha, beta, gamma and delta) would offer evidence of the guilt of Pacciani and Vanni. But Judge Francisco Ferri declined to accept this late evidence, and refused to reopen the case. As of this writing, Vanni remains in prison but Pacciani remains free.
Sexually sadistic serial killers like the Ripper, Vacher, Sutcliffe, Kemper and II Mostro, etc., who torture and/or mutilate their victims, form a minority sub-species of serial killer known as ‘lust murderers’. The sheer brutality of their crimes makes them the most feared of all sex murderers. In 1950, author and criminologist Dr J. Paul de River said of them in his book, Crime and the Sexual Psychopath, ‘The lust murderer usually, after killing his victim, tortures, cuts, maims or slashes the victim in the regions on or about the genitalia, rectum, breast in the female, and about the neck, throat and buttocks, as usually these parts contain sexual significance to him and serve as sexual stimulus.’
Thirty years later, two senior special agents from the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI at Quantico – Robert R. (‘Roy’) Hazelwood and John E. Douglas – put the lust killer under their joint behavioural microscope. Both agents were already vastly experienced in the ways of the serial killer, and are recognised today as authorities on criminal profiling. They describe lust murder as: ‘One of the most heinous crimes committed by man. While not a common occurrence, it is one which frightens and arouses the public as does no other crime . . . It is the authors’ contention that the lust murder is unique, and is distinguished from the sadistic homicide by the involvement of a mutilating attack or displacement of the breasts, rectum or genitals. Further, while there are always exceptions, basically two types of individuals commit the lust murder . . . the Organised Nonsocial and Disorganised Asocial personalities.’
Briefly, they define the organised nonsocial lust killer as an egocentric who dislikes people generally, yet is adept at posing as an outwardly warm person for as long as may be needed to gain his own ends. Behind the façade lies a cunning methodical killer who is very much aware of the impact his sort of murder will have on society – and commits it for precisely that reason, to shock and offend. Usually he ‘lives some distance from the crime scene and will cruise, looking for a victim’. Like his disorganised, fellow lust killer he ‘harbours similar feelings of hostility (to society) but . . . overtly expresses it through aggressive and seemingly senseless acts. Typically, he begins to demonstrate his hostility as he passes through puberty and into adolescence. He would be described as a troublemaker and a manipulator of people, concerned only for himself. It is the nonsocial’s aim to get even with society and inflict pain and punishment upon others.’
In contrast, the disorganised asocial lust killer is a loner. ‘He experiences difficulty in negotiating interpersonal relationships and consequently feels rejected and lonely. He lacks the cunning of the nonsocial type, and commits the crime in a more frenzied and less methodical manner. The crime is likely to be committed in close proximity to his residence or place of employment, where he feels secure and more at ease . . . Family and associates would describe him as a nice, quiet person who keeps himself to himself, but who never quite realised his potential. During adolescence he may have engaged in voyeuristic activities or the theft of feminine clothing. Such activities serve as a substitute for his inability to approach women sexually in a mature and confident manner.’
Evidence unwittingly revealed by the scene of the crime – such as the location of the body, the presence or absence of the murder weapon, and probable sequence in which the various criminal acts were performed – may also provide clues to the type of lust killer at work. ‘Typically, the asocial type leaves the body at the scene of death, and while the location is not open to the casual observer there has been no attempt to conceal the body. Conversely, the nonsocial type commits the murder in a secluded or isolated location, and may later transport it to an area where it is likely to be found. While there is no conscious intent to be arrested, the nonsocial type wants the excitement derived from the publicity about the body’s discovery and its impact on the victim’s community.’
By identifying the sequence of the criminal acts committed in a number of such murders – some obvious to the trained, naked eye, others revealed by the pathologist’s report – the two FBI authors established that lust killers usually murder their victims ‘shortly following abduction or attack . . . If however there is physical or medical evidence indicating that the victim was subjected to torture or mutilation prior to death, this factor indicates that the perpetrator is the nonsocial rather than the asocial type.’
The two agents also found that few lust killers use a gun to murder their victims. Firearms generally are too impersonal a weapon for such sexually sadistic murderers. To attain the ‘high’ they seek in the fulfilment of their violent, fantasy-inspired homicides, most prefer to use their hands more directly when despatching their victims. ‘Most frequently death results from strangulation, blunt force, or the use of a sharp, pointed instrument . . . The asocial type is more prone to use a weapon of opportunity and may leave it at the scene, while the nonsocial type may carry the murder weapon with him and take it when departing the scene. Therefore the murderer’s choice of weapon and its proximity to the scene can be greatly significant to the investigation.’
Even a superficial study of lust murders committed in countries thousands of miles from the United States – and in some instances, committed a century ago – reveals numerous behavioural characteristics similar to those noted by the two FBI authors in their survey. Jack the Ripper slit the throats of his five victims, and disembowelled four of them with a sharp, pointed long-bladed knife which he took with him on every foray into the streets of Whitechapel. (He did not leave the knife at any murder scene, nor was it found by the police. Its detailed description comes from pathologists, who gave evidence at the subsequent inquests.) Joseph Vacher carried a whole set of knives with him, plus a cudgel, throughout the three years he was ‘working’ in south-eastern France. They were recovered after his arrest. Similarly Peter Sutcliffe used two knives and ‘blunt force’ (in his case, a ball-headed hammer) to murder his victims. Thanks to the alertness of the uniformed police sergeant who arrested Sutcliffe on suspicion, both knives and the hammer were recov
ered next day.
Because he targeted two victims simultaneously, even Italy’s ‘Monster of Florence’ – one of the few lust killers known to use a gun when committing the murder – may be seen as an exception who proves the rule. II Mostro used his .22 pistol to eliminate the main threat (the male victim) at the outset; he then turned it on the female to silence her before she could raise the alarm. Having thus established control over the situation, he then attended to the principal task – the ritual ‘signature’ mutilation – by using a sharp knife to disembowel the female and remove selected body parts. Californian lust killer Ed Kemper’s modus operandi in the early 1970s was similar in certain respects. Because he targeted two female students at a time, he carried a gun to shoot them dead before transporting the bodies for mutilation (when he used a hunting knife, which he called ‘The General’).
Latterday British serial killers (as distinct from lust killers) Dennis Nilsen, Kenneth Erskine, and John Duffy also strangled their victims. So did John Reginald Halliday Christie, London’s notorious ‘Monster of 10 Rillington Place’, in the 1950s; but none mutilated their victims. Erskine and Christie used their bare hands: although Christie, who was a necrophiliac, had first to ply his prostitute victims with drink, and finally render them insensible with coal-gas inhalation before he was physically capable of rape-strangulation. Perhaps coincidentally, the civil servant serial killer Dennis Nilsen used his tie to throttle his victims. John Duffy, once regarded as a comparatively ‘non-vicious’ rapist – only to become a singularly vicious killer – used a stick and length of string (or an article of clothing taken from the victim) to form a tourniquet, and so exert immense pressure round the murder victim’s throat.
Among the many theories about Jack the Ripper’s lifestyle, perhaps the most widely accepted was that he was a doctor. This stemmed largely from the premise that such precise mutilation, carried out in the dark and aimed at the removal of selected organs from a human body, necessarily required specialist skills which could only be acquired in medical school. While never discounting the possibility, no FBI criminal profiler at Quantico would accept that supposition per se. Although such murders remain comparatively rare, research shows that twentieth-century lust killers with no medical training whatsoever sometimes decapitate their victims, and/or remove arms, legs, feet, hands, breasts, buttocks, genitals, etc. in the course of their fantasy-inspired murders. They do so not necessarily to destroy the victim symbolically (though that may apply to some): often the intention is to retain certain body parts, for much the same reason as the big-game hunter mounts the head and antlers taken from his prey, and the lepidopterist pins rare, dead butterflies to his board – as trophies of the chase.
A few serial killers collect bodies. Christie stripped some of his victims naked, and stored them in his kitchen cupboard (in his case as sexual partners as well as trophies: evidence of sexual intercourse was found in all (three) cupboard corpses). Robert Hansen, the Alaskan baker and big-game enthusiast who hunted his naked prostitute victims through the snow before shooting them dead, was a trophy hunter. As a married man with a family, it would have been impossible for him to store human ‘trophies’ at home alongside the elk antlers and bearskins adorning the gun room. Instead, he stole items of paste jewellery from his victims – and hid them in his loft, so that he could relive his fantasy-inspired murders at will.
Jewellery – usually rings, brooches, bracelets and earrings – are commonly taken by serial killers from their victims as ‘souvenirs’, regardless of monetary value; as with Hansen, the motive is gratification. Others collect footwear and clothing, fetish items mostly such as stiletto-heeled shoes, nylon stockings, suspender belts, brassieres and panties. When Scotland Yard detectives searched John Christie’s house in Rillington Place shortly before they arrested him in 1953, they discovered some of the more bizarre ‘souvenirs’ collected by any serial murderer – four sets of pubic hair, neatly waxed, stored in an otherwise empty pipe-tobacco tin. The sets were never matched to any of the bodies found on the premises.
Some serial killers take video films and/or still pictures of their victims, dead and alive, as ‘souvenirs’ (see Harvey Glatman, pp. 149–52). Police in California in the 1980s found pornographic ‘snuff’ videos made by Leonard Lake and Charles Ng as they tortured and abused their three abducted ‘sex slaves’ at Wisleyville (see here). Other serial killers tape-record the screams and pleas for mercy uttered by their victims; these, too, are stored and kept for subsequent gratification at will. On Boxing Day 1964, the ‘Moors Murderers’ Ian Brady and Myra Hindley tape-recorded the cries of ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, as they stripped the child and forced her to pose for pornographic pictures shortly before they murdered her. The recording, which was taped to the background music of Christmas carols, was played to the jury at the Moors Murderers’ trial two years later. Although they denied torturing the child, the judge said in his summing-up: ‘One will never forget how the recording started with that fantastic screaming from the girl. What was happening before that screaming, and a woman’s and a child’s voice only were being heard?’
As well as the torture and mutilation of their victims, and the theft of jewellery or clothing as souvenirs, some serial killers also practise anthropophagy. This is not a recent phenomenon; there were written indications of cannibalism following the murder of Kate Eddowes in 1888 (see here), and there have been a number of known cases during the present century. In the early 1920s Karl Denke, who ran a boarding house in Munsterberg, Silesia, murdered at least thirty of his male and female lodgers. With rare Teutonic attention to detail he then entered their names, deadweight, and date of death in a ledger before pickling the choice cuts in brine, and eating them. Denke committed suicide shortly after his arrest in 1921, by hanging himself with his braces.
Joachim Kroll, alias ‘The Ruhr Hunter’, murdered some fourteen people over a period of seventeen years before his arrest at Duisburg, in West Germany, in 1976. Most were women. Kroll, a small, balding man who sported tinted glasses, ate the flesh of five of his younger female victims; three teenagers and two children, aged four and five. He was caught eventually, not by any feat of investigative skill but because, like Dennis Nilsen (see here), Kroll blocked the drains. He had a meal of human flesh and vegetables cooking on the stove as police entered his apartment. Possibly the most notorious known flesh eater in sex-crime history was the New York painter and decorator, Albert Fish. Fish was a true sadist. Six years after abducting and murdering a girl of ten, he wrote an anonymous letter to the child’s mother, admitting the murder, saying ‘how sweet the flesh tasted, roasted in the oven’. As if by poetic justice, a design on the envelope betrayed Fish’s whereabouts, and he was caught in 1934 by a dedicated policeman from the city’s Missing Persons Bureau, who put off retirement for two years to get his man. Fish, by then a man of sixty-four, confessed to the murder of some four hundred children over the preceding quarter-century. Unfortunately Fish – like Henry Lee Lucas (see here) and most serial killers – was a compulsive liar; but although his overall confession was suspect he was thought to be responsible for ‘dozens’ of child murders, and was executed by electric chair in 1934. One behavioural characteristic he confirmed was that while mutilation of their victims is common to both categories of lust killer, anthropophagy is indicative of asocial involvement.
Special agents Hazelwood and Douglas also established that one of the oldest crime fiction chestnuts – that the murderer returns to the scene of the crime, like a moth to a candle – is true of both types of lust killer, ‘albeit for different reasons . . . While the asocial type may return to engage in further mutilation or to relive the experience, the nonsocial type returns to determine if the body has been discovered and to check on the progress of the investigation.’ So compelling is the urge of the non-social killer to check on police progress that some frequent the bars used by off-duty detectives, either to eavesdrop or even intrude on their converstion on some pretext. Ed Kemper (see
here) was almost a ‘regular’ at his local police haunts. Another serial killer ‘returned to the scene after it had been examined by police laboratory technicians and deposited articles of clothing worn by the victim on the day she died. In both of two other cases, the killer visited the cemetery site . . . and left articles belonging to the victim on her grave. Such actions appear to further his “will to power”, or desire to control.’
One major riddle bequeathed by Jack the Ripper was why did he cease killing so abruptly after his ritual mutilation of Mary Jane Kelly – victim number five – on the night of 8 November 1888? The two most widely accepted theories are that either he fled the country to avoid arrest, or that he committed suicide. The first seems unlikely, for a variety of reasons. Despite claims to the contrary, Scotland Yard patently did not have the remotest clue to his identity; it is a case which remains unsolved after more than one hundred years. Furthermore, while murderers of every kind frequently leave a particular area to avoid arrest, statistics show that ‘working’ serial killers rarely cease killing of their own volition – and certainly not because they change location. The reverse, in fact, is often the case: serial killers change location to avoid arrest in order to carry on killing.
Ted Bundy is one recent notorious example. Following the hue and cry which attended his first eight murders in 1974, Bundy moved from Washington (state) to Utah, and later from Utah to Colorado, killing afresh each time; and after he excaped from jail a second time and moved to Florida, so the murders began again. Earle Nelson, alias ‘The Gorilla Killer’ of the 1920s, murdered twenty-two people (mostly landladies) between February 1926 and June 1927. He was on the move all the time, from California to Oregon, down to Iowa, across to New York state, back to Illinois and across into Canada – where he was caught, and hanged, in 1928. Because it pays serial killers in the United States to be transient (driving from one state into another, which will have separate jurisdiction, automatically lessens the chances of arrest), FBI analysts at Quantico now use computer links via Washington to monitor cases geographically (see here). Had the Ripper felt constrained to quit England in November 1888 for fear of arrest – because of the hue and cry – he would still have been unlikely to be able to resist killing again: homicide is the serial killer’s raison d’être. Furthermore, in an era when the ‘signature’ ritual mutilation of a victim was so rare as to bring him lasting notoriety, it is logical to assume that any new spate of ritual mutilation murders – no matter where they occurred – would inevitably have attracted massive publicity.