The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  D.B. Cooper was the name given by a man who bought a ticket for a North-West Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon to Mexico on Thanksgiving Day,3 24 November 1971. After the plane was airborne he handed a hijack note to a stewardess, which said he was carrying a live bomb and was taking over the aircraft. The pilot was forced to head north, and landed at Seattle, Washington, where ‘D.B. Cooper’ demanded and was given 200,000 dollars in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes. In turn he allowed the other passengers and some of the cabin crew to disembark before ordering the pilot to take off again for Mexico. Once airborne, however, the pilot was forced to level off at 10,000 feet over the snowy Cascade Mountains range south of Seattle, whereupon the hijacker attached one parachute harness to the suitcase containing the ransom money, strapped a second on himself, and baled out, via the tail-section passenger entrance. No trace of ‘D.B. Cooper’ was found, dead or alive, despite a massive ground search; and the theory that he might have perished during or after descent – this was grizzly bear country – appeared to be strengthened by the discovery nine years later of 5,800 dollars of the ransom money, washed up on the banks of the Columbia River (which marks the border between Washington State and Oregon). Whatever the fate of the resourceful ‘D.B. Cooper’, John List – alias ‘Robert Clark’ – left Virginia in handcuffs on 8 June 1989 for Newark, New Jersey, to face charges of family mass murder dating back to 1971. No date for his trial – which could perhaps shed new light on the ‘D.B. Cooper’ hijack – had been set when this book went to press.

  The second category of ‘mass murder’ – classic mass murder – i.e. the killing of four or more (non-family) victims in a single location at one time – is a type of homicide which is becoming increasingly frequent worldwide. Charles Whitman, a twenty-five-year-old architectural engineering student at the University of Texas, in Austin, was an early classic mass murderer. In August 1986, after first murdering his wife and mother (by stabbing both to death), he piled a handcart with guns, ammunition, ropes, a radio and supplies of food, barricaded himself in a campus tower at Austin and blazed away at everyone who came into his sights. Within ninety minutes Whitman shot dead sixteen men and women and wounded thirty more, some seriously. Police eventually surrounded the tower and shot him dead.

  Classic mass murderers are usually found to be mentally ill men, who unleash their growing hostility to society in an orgy of stabbing or shooting (mostly) random victims. Whitman himself had earlier called on the campus psychiatrist, and spoken of spasmodic ‘rages’ which caused him to assault his wife and at times threatened to overwhelm him. However, he cancelled a subsequent appointment, saying he ‘would work things out himself’. Instead, he ran amok. The post-mortem revealed that he had a brain tumour.

  A number of similar classic mass murders have occurred since the Whitman shootings, particularly in Australia and Canada as well as the United States. The most recent, which also took place on a university campus, was at the University of Montreal in December 1989. There Marc Lepine, a single, French-speaking, unemployed young man of twenty-five who himself aspired to become an undergraduate, burst into classrooms brandishing a semi-automatic .22 Storm Ruger rifle. At first some students thought it was a joke. ‘You’re all a bunch of feminists,’ he shouted – but then opened fire selectively on women students, killing fourteen and wounding nine more before taking his own life. Four men students were also wounded in the course of the massacre.

  It transpired that Lepine, a dark-haired, heavily bearded man who was obsessed by books and films about war, bore a grudge against all women – whom he blamed for ‘a life filled with disappointments’. Police found a letter on him which contained a ‘hit list’ of fifteen prominent Quebec women, and was filled with complaints that ‘feminists . . . have always spoiled my life’. He entered the campus without arousing suspicion by carrying the semi-automatic rifle wrapped in a green refuse bag. He opened fire first in the engineering building cafeteria, killing three girl students. Next he burst into a classroom on the second floor, separated the two sexes at gunpoint and – after ordering the men to leave – fired bursts at the screaming girl students, killing six and wounding several others. ‘It was a human hunt, and we were the quarry’, said student Françoise Bordelau later. ‘I heard the man say “I want the women!”’ Lepine moved on to shoot dead three women undergraduates working in the computer room, and stalked those who fled through the corridors, firing as he went. Finally he turned the gun on himself.

  FBI profilers list two other kinds of multiple murderer – ‘spree’ and ‘serial’ killers. A spree killer is one who commits murder in two or more locations with no cooling-off period between the homicides – all of which are related in that they form part of a single event. Such events may be of indeterminate length, and involve more than one local police force. On 6 September 1949 Howard Unruh walked through his home town of Camden, New Jersey, firing a 9mm Luger at anyone who crossed his path. In the one deadly twenty-minute event he murdered thirteen chance victims and wounded three more. This was officially classed as a spree killing because the killings were carried out in different areas of the town.

  The most notorious spree killer in British criminal history was a twenty-seven-year-old, unmarried man named Michael Ryan. On 19 August 1987 Ryan – who had no previous criminal record – murdered sixteen people and wounded fourteen others in what became known as ‘The Hungerford Massacre’, and took his own life when cornered by the police. Ryan lived alone with his mother in Hungerford, a market town in rural Berkshire on the ancient Roman road to Bath. He was a fantasist who found difficulty in establishing any kind of normal relationship with women. Instead, he invented ‘girlfriends’. Male acquaintances (Ryan had no close friends, of either sex) knew him as a loner who bragged about his women friends and even spoke of his former ‘wife’, who had divorced him for his adultery. He also claimed to be an ex-paratrooper and a trained pilot. None of it was true. Relatives – who had never seen him with a girl – thought him a pleasant, quiet young man who neither drank to excess nor took drugs. Yet all the evidence suggests that a singularly clumsy bid by Ryan to rape at gunpoint a respectable married woman – who had never set eyes on him before, and was out for the day with her children – was the single event which sparked off the ‘Hungerford Massacre’.

  It may be an indication of the kind of mental hurdle the prospect of sex with a woman presented to Ryan that, on the sunny summer’s morning he set out for Savernake Forest – a beauty spot nine miles from Hungerford – he armed and equipped himself like a man marching off to war. He stowed a semi-automatic AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifle, loaded with armour-piercing bullets, and an Ml carbine (as used by US infantry in World War Two and the Korean war) in the boot of his car, and tied a 9mm Beretta pistol to his wrist. He further donned a bullet-proof waistcoat and a ‘Rambo’-style headband, and carried full survival kit (groundsheet, filled water bottle, food, spare magazines, etc.) with him. It later emerged that he had been seen at Savernake earlier: the events of 19 August suggest it may have been for reconnaissance.

  Sometime that morning Mrs Susan Godfrey, a thirty-three-year-old housewife who lived near Reading and had driven her two children, aged four and two, to Savernake for a picnic treat, became Ryan’s first chance victim of the day. He forced her, at gunpoint, to strap her children in the back seat of her car, and made her accompany him into the forest carrying her blue family picnic groundsheet. Mrs Godfrey died shortly afterwards in a hail of bullets fired from the Kalashnikov, presumably as she attempted to flee. She was not sexually assaulted. Ryan apparently panicked and headed back to Hungerford, leaving the children unharmed. He stopped briefly at a service station on the Hungerford-Marlborough road to fill up with petrol. He then aimed a burst from the AK47 at the woman cashier (who knew him by sight) – but she escaped unhurt by diving to the floor, and rang the police. Ryan reached Hungerford ten minutes later and went on the rampage, murdering fifteen people – including his mother, and the first (unarm
ed) policeman to arrive on the scene – and burned his mother’s house to the ground, before holing up in the school he attended as a boy. Rather than surrender to the armed police who then surrounded the building (and tried to talk Ryan into giving himself up) he put the Beretta to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  It was this nine-mile drive from Savernake Forest – where he murdered Mrs Godfrey – to the second killing ground at Hungerford which, by FBI classification, changes Ryan from ‘classic mass murderer’ into ‘spree killer’. This is not to split hairs: such meticulous classification is of major importance to the Quantico criminal analysis programme, which is based on common behavioural characteristics identified in specific types of violent offender.

  FBI analysts, for example, define a serial killer as a murderer who is involved in three or more separate events, with an emotional cooling-off period between each homicide. As we have previously noted (see here), this cooling-off period is the main trait which distinguishes the serial killer from all other multiple murderers. Other identifiable differences may be found in their choice of victim. Serial killers tend to preselect a type of victim to murder, whereas classic mass murderers and spree killers will both murder whichever human targets happen to present themselves. Similarly the serial killer controls the successive stages of each murder he commits (to a larger or lesser degree, depending whether he is an organised or disorganised offender); while neither the classic mass murderer nor the spree killer is likely to have an opportunity to do so once the law enforcement agency concerned closes in on him.

  Again, serial killers rarely commit suicide when apprehended (see here). Yet spree killers frequently take their own lives, even when they cannot fail to be aware that no death sentence awaits them in law. Michael Ryan, ringed by police in Hungerford and unable to escape, was one such example: the death penalty for murder in Britain had been abolished for eleven years at the time of the ‘massacre’. Many classic mass murderers also seem not to want to live, once their own compulsive urge to kill has abated. Some, like Marc Lepine, then shoot themselves. Others – Charles Whitman, for example – carry on killing until the law enforcement agency concerned is left with no recourse but to kill them; offender behaviour which some regard not as defiance of authority, but as an oblique form of suicide.

  Similarly, the specific classification of single homicides – possibly committed in different locations over an indeterminate period and not immediately connected – may enable them to be linked as series murder, either by forensic evidence or crime scene analysis. Another demonstration of the value of homicide classification by behavioural analysis was provided by the Francine Elveson investigation (pp. 91–4), during which the FBI profile advised the police that the (then unknown) offender was liable to kill again unless apprehended.

  Sometimes a serial killer will turn spree killer. Heightened tension is usually the cause, for example during an investigation in which the serial killer is positively identified. As pressure on the offender mounts hourly from police vigilance and media publicity, so the man on the run puts aside the cooling-off period and kills repeatedly, spree-style. Even his motivation for killing may change. Instead of stalking a specific type of victim for sexual gratification, he may murder from sheer desperation – for instance, if he urgently needs to buy time by changing his getaway car and so throw his pursuers off the scent.

  This was the scenario which unfolded in 1984 during the nationwide hunt by police and FBI for the most notorious serial-turned-spree-killer in US criminal history, Christopher Bernard Wilder. ‘Chris’ Wilder was an unmarried, wealthy Australian-born racing driver and entrepreneur who arrived in Miami in 1970, aged twenty-five. He invested in commerce and property and lived in style, with a Cadillac alongside the Porsche racing car at his luxury home in Boynton Beach, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a speedboat tied up at the quay. An athletic, neatly-dressed man with a beard and moustache, Wilder was also an able photographer; good enough to boast of many a conquest by promising to transform aspiring models into cover-girls for smart fashion magazines.

  In 1980, unknown to his friends on the Grand Prix circuit, he was charged with raping two teenagers at Palm Springs, California. It was a case which attracted little publicity. The teenagers said they felt ‘dizzy’ and were raped by Wilder after he photographed them eating pizzas – which he supplied – ostensibly for an advertising feature. He told the court the girls were willing participants who sued only when they learned he was rich. In the absence of any forensic evidence to support the drug allegations, Wilder was bound over for five years. Then in August 1983, during a brief return visit to Australia where he was alleged to have posed as a professional photographer and agent, Wilder appeared in court in Sydney charged with abducting and raping two fifteen-year-old girls. By then he held dual US and Australian citizenship; and after he had pleaded urgent business in America and with relatives standing bail, the hearing was put back until April 1984.

  How many murders he may have committed following his return to Miami is uncertain, since he did not live long enough to stand trial. But in the seven weeks between 26 February and 12 April 1984 Chris Wilder is thought to have attacked and abducted at least eleven women, ten of whom were duped into believing he was a professional photographer. Eight of the ten were either murdered or disappeared – presumed murdered – during the course of a marathon, serial-turned-spree-killer manhunt which started in Florida, moved north to Georgia, headed west through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Nevada into California, then swung back east via Indiana, New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to within a few miles of the Canadian border, where Wilder – the quarry – was shot dead.

  Three of the four victims whose bodies were found had been raped and stabbed to death. The fourth – Wilder’s last victim, and oldest of the eleven at thirty-three – was shot dead and dumped in a gravel pit. He hijacked her car in a desperate attempt to shake off his pursuers, and made no attempt to molest her. The fate of the four missing women remains unknown. The three who survived were all abducted, bound hand and foot, gagged with adhesive tape, beaten, raped, sexually abused and tortured by Wilder with an electric prod; one also had her eyelids sealed with superglue. Two of them escaped – one outwitted Wilder, the other was stabbed several times by him and left for dead. Wilder himself freed the third – a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had abducted ten days earlier in Torrance, California. She lived because she developed what is sometimes called the ‘Patti Hearst’ syndrome (see here) – a shocked condition, in which a kidnap victim may identify with her captor(s) as the only means of saving her life.

  Wilder first came to the attention of the Miami police in February 1984 following the disappearance of a Cuban model named Rosario Gonzales. Miss Gonzales, a pretty twenty-year-old who was engaged to be married, vanished from a Grand Prix race meeting in which Wilder competed (he came seventeenth) and where she had taken a part-time job. Wilder was questioned when her fiancé told the police he photographed the missing girl during the meeting. Wilder agreed that he had, but said she had approached him for help in finding work as a model, and insisted they had not met again.

  Two weeks later Elizabeth Kenyon, aged twenty-three and a part-time teacher and model, vanished after pulling in at a service station in Coral Gables, Miami, with a male companion who paid for the petrol. Miss Kenyon told the pump attendant (whom she knew) that she was on her way to the airport for a photographic session. Two days later the car was found abandoned at Miami international airport. She was never seen again. When enquiries revealed that Wilder knew and had photographed Elizabeth Kenyon before her disappearance, he was again questioned by the police. He denied meeting her on the day she drove to the airport, and the garage attendant was unable to describe the man he had seen with Miss Kenyon in the car.

  This time, however, the investigating police persisted with their enquiries, and discovered that Wilder had twice appeared in court on rape charges, in Palm Springs and Sydney. Two days later, on 20 M
arch 1984, Miami detectives drove to Bainbridge, south Georgia, where a nineteen-year-old woman student had been sexually assaulted by a man answering Wilder’s description. Guests in a motel at Bainbridge had broken into a locked bathroom overnight to rescue a screaming, hysterical, naked girl whose hands were tied behind her back and her ankles hobbled by nylon cord. A strip of silver-coloured adhesive tape hung from one corner of her mouth, and she was unable to open her eyes. After treatment in hospital she told the police that a well-dressed, bearded man approached her the previous afternoon in a shopping centre at Tallahassee (in north Florida, five hours’ drive from Bainbridge), claiming to be a fashion photographer. He allayed her suspicions by showing her a montage of pictures. As she posed fully-dressed for photographs in nearby public gardens the man hit her, hid her bound and gagged inside a sleeping bag in the boot of his car, and drove to Bainbridge – where he smuggled her into the motel room under cover of darkness.

  After submitting her to an ordeal of beating, rape, and torture he eventually allowed her to use the bathroom – with her hands tied behind her back, her ankles hobbled, and (as a further precaution against escape) her eyelids sealed with superglue. Once inside she managed to slide the bolt with one hand, held her face against the corner of a cabinet to tear the sticking plaster from her mouth – and screamed. All her rescuers saw of the man were the rearlights of his car. However, she was able to identify Wilder from photographs carried by the police from Miami, and the manhunt began.