The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  Crime – particularly murder – produces the feeling of being ‘beyond the pale’. Case after case demonstrates that the ‘self-esteem killer’ copes with this problem in a manner reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade: by telling himself that, in the war against society, he is in the right and society is in the wrong. This explains why such killers often keep journals. If possible, he finds himself an accomplice – or, in the case of the Manson clan, a group of accomplices – who share his antisocial outlook. If he lacks accomplices, he may choose the rather more dangerous course of taking a ‘normal’ acquaintance into his confidence. In this way, Dr Jekyll can be propitiated by a kind of intellectual sleight of hand: if a ‘normal’ person knows about his crimes, then they cannot be truly abnormal, and he himself cannot be ‘outside society’.

  One of the most characteristic of such cases occurred in America in the late 1950s; although it involved sex crime, the self-esteem element is so obtrusive that the case may be regarded as a kind of watershed or turning point.

  On Sunday, 11 January 1959 an old blue Chevrolet forced another car off a lonely country road in Virginia, and a tall, thin young man with staring eyes advanced on it waving a revolver. He ordered the Jackson family – consisting of Carrol Jackson, his wife Mildred, and their two children, Susan, age five, and a baby, Janet – into the boot of his car, and sped off. Carrol Jackson was later found dead in a ditch; underneath him lay Janet, who had also been shot. Two months later, the bodies of Mildred Jackson and Susan were uncovered in Maryland; Mildred Jackson had been strangled with a stocking and Susan battered to death.

  Two years earlier, in June 1957, a man with staring eyes had approached a courting couple in a car – an army sergeant and a woman named Margaret Harold – and asked for a lift. On the way he pulled out a gun and demanded money; when Margaret Harold said: ‘Don’t give it to him’, he shot her in the back of the head. The sergeant flung open the door and ran. When police found the car, they also found the body of Margaret Harold lying across the front seat without her dress; a police spokesman described the killer as ‘a sexual degenerate’. Near the scene of the crime the police discovered a deserted shack full of pornographic pictures.

  Five months after the murders of the Jackson family, in May 1959, the police received an anonymous tip-off that the murderer was a jazz musician named Melvin Rees; but police were unable to trace Rees. Early the following year, a salesman named Glenn Moser went to the police, acknowledged that he was the author of the anonymous tip-off, and told them that he now had the suspect’s address: Melvin Rees was working in a music shop in Memphis, Arkansas. Rees was arrested there, and soon after he was identified by the army sergeant as the man who had shot Margaret Harold. A search of the home of Rees’s parents uncovered the revolver with which Carrol Jackson had been shot, and a diary describing the abduction of the Jacksons and their murder. ‘Caught on a lonely road . . .Drove to a select area and killed the husband and baby. Now the mother and daughter were all mine.’ He described forcing Mildred Jackson to perform oral sex, and then raping her repeatedly; the child was also apparently raped. (Full details have never been released.) He concluded: ‘I was her master.’ The diary also described the sex murders of four more girls in Maryland. Rees was executed in 1961.

  Violent sex murders were common enough by the late 1950s. What makes this one unique for its period was Rees’s ‘Sadeian’ attitude of self-justification. On the night before the Jackson killings, Rees had been on a ‘benzedrine kick’, and in the course of a rambling argument had told Moser: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards make it right or wrong.’ He had also explained that he wanted to experience everything: love, hate, life, death . . .When, after the murders, Moser asked him outright whether he was the killer, Rees disdained to lie; he simply refused to answer, leaving Moser to draw the self-evident conclusion. Rees was an ‘intellectual’ who, like Moors murderer Ian Brady in the following decade, made the decision to rape and kill on the grounds that ‘everything is lawful’. He may therefore be regarded as one of the first examples of the curious modern phenomenon, the ‘high IQ killer’. His sexual fantasies involved sadism (Mildred Jackson’s death had been long and agonising) and power. In that sense, his crimes anticipate those of the serial killer who was to emerge two decades later.

  Unfortunately we know nothing of Rees’s background, or what turned him into a serial killer. Yet on the basis of other cases, we can state with a fair degree of confidence that parental affection was lacking in childhood, and that he was a lonely introverted child who was not much liked by his schoolmates. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a case of a serial killer of whom this is not true.

  Rees and Glatman are early examples of the ‘power-motivated’ criminal, a category that would become so familiar in the 1980s. Germany’s version of the Cameron Hooker case came to public attention in May 1984. On 3 May a nineteen-year-old girl named Beate Koch was walking along a country road near the village of Pillnach – not far from Regensburg – when she was attacked by a man who dragged her into the nearest house – his own. She recognised him as a member of the academic community from the University of Regensburg, Dr Ulrich Kochwald, whose field was sexual research. Kochwald was an odd-looking man – six feet four inches tall and very thin, with protruding eyes that were magnified by pebble glasses; the top of his head was bald, but thin blond hair descended from the back and sides to his shoulders. Having threatened to kill her if she didn’t stop struggling, Kochwald tore off her clothes, raped her, and beat her with a rope. Then he handcuffed her and forced her down to the basement, where she was surprised to discover that she was not the only prisoner. Another handcuffed girl was confined there – also naked – hanging from a hook in the ceiling. This was twenty-four-year-old Sabine Pauli; she was one of Kochwald’s students, and had been flattered when he invited her to lunch one day. After lunch, he had attacked her, raped her, and taken her to the basement, where she had been ever since. Kochwald beat her regularly and treated her as a ‘sex slave’. Since her family lived far away, no-one had yet noticed her disappearance.

  That night, Beate Koch succeeded in escaping. The two women were close enough together for Beate to lift herself by locking her legs around her companion, and jerking the handcuffs clear of the hook in the ceiling. Sabine urged her not to bother about releasing her, but to leave as quickly as possible. Beate staggered home through the dark, and arrived there covered in mud and scratches. Her parents had notified the police of her disappearance, and a local sergeant had already obtained search warrants for various houses along the road between the villages. Within a short time the sergeant was knocking on Dr Kochwald’s door; when Kochwald opened it, the sergeant informed him that he was under arrest, and handcuffed him to a radiator. Then he hurried down to the basement, and freed Sabine Pauli, who was covered with bruises and cigarette burns.

  Newspaper publicity caused another of Kochwald’s victims to come forward. Her name was Susanne Wagner, and she had lived with Kochwald for some time after the break-up of his marriage. But they had quarrelled a great deal, and on 4 June 1981 she had announced that she was leaving him. Kochwald’s reaction was to handcuff her, tear off her clothes, and drag her to the basement, where he had hung her from a hook in the ceiling, then beat her with a rope. He had terrorised her and kept her prisoner for the next year. Sometimes she was handcuffed to the kitchen stove, sometimes to the radiator in Kochwald’s bedroom. Later, when he was certain that she was too terrified to try to escape – he told her he would hunt her down and kill her – he even allowed her to go around without handcuffs. He kept her naked, hoping that this would deter her from showing herself in public. On 24 May 1982 she managed to slip her handcuffs by greasing her wrists with soap, and escaped through a window. A passing motorist took her to hospital, but Susanne was so afraid of Kochwald that she had told no-one of her year in captivity.

  On 22 May 1986 Ulrich Kochwald was sentenced to five and a half years in jail
for kidnapping.

  As in the case of Melvin Rees, we know nothing of the psychological background that turned Kochwald into a sadist. But other cases in this chapter would suggest that this unnattractive man – noted at the university for the dullness of his lectures – had been an unattractive and lonely child, with a tendency to fantasise. The latter is confirmed by Susanne Wagner, to whom he had confided that he had always dreamed of keeping several women as sex slaves, and that he had once enquired into the possibility of becoming a Mohammedan – so that he could have four wives – but had discovered that in Germany bigamy is illegal, even for Moslems.

  We have seen that the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome has many strange variations. The sufferer may attempt to deal with it through a variety of techniques, ranging from intellectual self-justification in the manner of de Sade to making some absurd error that leads to arrest. In a few cases, the ‘suicide syndrome’ results in actual self-destruction.

  On 16 July 1973 a hysterical teenage girl who identified herself as Mary Ellen Jones rushed into a police station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and told the police that her boyfriend had been murdered, and that she had been repeatedly raped by the killer. Two days previously, the young couple – who had met only the day before on the local beach – had been offered a lift by a middle-aged man driving a white Dodge van. He had introduced himself as ‘Eric’, and offered to give them work in his home in south Miami. Once inside the bungalow, the man had threatened them with a gun and told them to undress. Then he ordered them to perform various abnormal sex acts while he took photographs. In order to hold the camera, he had to place the gun beside him. The youth – sixteen-year-old Mark Matson – waited his chance, then hurled himself at their tormentor. He was not quick enough; ‘Eric’ snatched up the gun and fired three times, hitting the youth in the head, shoulder and chest. Then he dragged the body into the bathroom, and took the girl through a steel-lined door and into a soundproof compartment at the end of his bedroom. There he shackled her to the wall, and raped her repeatedly for twenty-four hours. At the end of that time, when she was expecting to die, he unchained her, telling her: ‘I’ve taken a life, but now I’m going to give you your life.’ He drove her back into Fort Lauderdale and released her.

  She hurried to the nearest police station. When the police learned she was a runaway, they telephoned her home in Frankfort, Kentucky; the girl’s mother told them that she was a pathological liar, and advised them not to believe a word she said. The mother then wired money, and the girl was sent home by plane to Kentucky.

  Five days later, on Saturday, 21 July 1973, a housewife in South Dade County was removing washing from her clothesline when she noticed that her next-door neighbour, Albert Brust, was sitting in a chair on his lawn, oblivious of the falling rain. And when her son mentioned that Brust had been there for the past two days, she rang the Fort Lauderdale police and told them: ‘I think there’s a dead man in the garden next door.’

  An autopsy revealed that Albert Brust, a forty-four-year-old Dade County building inspector, had taken a dose of cyanide in chocolate milk. When the police entered his house, they noticed the unpleasant smell, like rotting meat. It came from the bathroom. When the shower curtain was pulled aside, they found themselves looking at a wall of concrete, from which a little blood was seeping. It had to be demolished piecemeal before it revealed a mutilated body, minus its hands, feet and head. The head had been obscenely placed between the thighs, and the hands and feet were found embedded in the concrete. At that point, the police remembered Mary Ellen Jones’s story, and realised that she must have been telling the truth.

  A search of the rest of the house made it clear that Albert Brust was a ‘sex freak’ obsessed with torture. In fact, the room at the end of the bedroom – in which the teenage girl had been raped – had obviously been designed as a torture chamber, with chains hanging from the ceiling, and a variety of whips, cat o’ nine tails, belts and padlocks. An item of furniture of peculiar design was apparently a ‘Chinese raping stool’. There were also pornographic videos and books, and obscene pictures on the walls. Yet he possessed many gramophone records, and the bookcase contained a wide range of philosophical texts, from Spinoza and Voltaire to Unamuno and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Brust also owned several volumes of the Marquis de Sade, whose works had been published openly in America in the 1960s.

  Investigation into Brust’s background revealed that he was a New Yorker, born in 1929. When he was twenty-one, he had been sentenced to a term of from three to ten years in jail for abduction, assault, robbery and grand larceny. In prison he learned carpentry and welding, and taught himself calculus. He became a construction worker for twelve years before moving, in 1972, to Dade County, Florida, where he obtained a position as an inspector of buildings. This ugly, short little man had few friends. He drove a powerful motor cycle, and frequented a local motor-cycle shop, apparently hoping to find sex (he was bisexual). The owner of the shop commented that Brust described himself as a Jekyll and Hyde personality, and that he talked a great deal of sex, suicide and murder. Brust had told him that he had killed someone in New York and disposed of the body in the East River, and that he had once ‘concreted’ somebody. ‘When you first kill someone,’ Brust told him, ‘it’s like breaking the ice. It’s an obstacle in the beginning, but after that nothing.’

  These remarks led the police to dig up Brust’s back garden and to search his house carefully for more signs of ‘concreting’. They found nothing.

  Like so many ‘loners’, Brust kept a journal, and it revealed a negative, morbid personality. ‘Rape, murder, suicide. These thoughts are constantly with me . . .Of course, this is not mentally ‘healthy’ – there is no doubt that by present standards I am mentally ill, a hopeless sociopath.’ ‘My reason tells me that I have nothing to live for. Intellectually, sexually, occupationally, socially – everywhere a dead end. The pain now outweighs the pleasure and every day adds weight to the logic of self-destruction.’ ‘I need this safety valve, this writing, to keep me straight and calm and determined to bring my – death project – to a successful end.’ The ‘death project’, apparently, was suicide. He suffered, he said, from ‘alienation and sexual frustration and creative impotence.’ There is a classic statement of the problem of the ‘romantic outsider’: ‘While my books have a tranquilising effect on me, reinforcing the Dr Jekyll side of my personality, it is also true that they paralyse me into inaction. They cause me to think about death, to be fatalistic and pessimistic, prone to suicide.’ ‘The culprit is my emotions. Once stirred, blind rage tends to take over and I get both homicidal and suicidal.’ Brust’s philosophy was that man was evil, that government was useless, and that society must be strictly controlled. These views led him to express admiration for Hitler; he also enjoyed talking, in a mock-German accent, about what should be done with Jews.

  Brust was irritable, sarcastic and aggressive. ‘He thought he was above everyone else,’ said one of his acquaintances. ‘And the terrible thing was, it was true.’ Brust had passed a University of Chicago correspondence course in algebra and analytic geometry; but years of frustration had developed a highly intolerant personality. ‘He hated Catholics, cats, dogs – almost everything,’ said the motor cycle shop owner. He craved a woman, but was only willing to contemplate a relationship with one who was willing to be his slave. He told a woman psychology student that he had once thought of marrying a blonde female acquaintance, ‘big in bosom and bottom’, and decidedly dumb, but had changed his mind. Incredibly, it seems probable that, at forty-four, he was still a virgin. ‘After work I always get home as soon as possible to enjoy my solitary sanctuary and its music and books and TV. No sex yet, but I’m working on it – slowly, but with determined resolve. I know what I want. I need someone for sex, yes – but not an idiot I have to cater to. Enter the Brustian solution . . .’ The ‘Brustian solution’ was to kidnap a girl and hold her as his slave in the ‘torture chamber’. His opportunity came w
hen he saw Mark Matson and Mary Ellen Jones hitchhiking out of Fort Lauderdale; but the orgy that followed left him as unsatisfied as the murder of Kim Rabat had left Robert Poulin – whom, in spite of the twenty-seven-year age difference, Brust resembles in so many ways. ‘I have miscalculated’, Brust wrote.’ . . .1 know I can save the situation by a lot of disagreeable work’ – he obviously meant recovering Mark Matson’s body and burying it in the garden – ‘but I see no good reason for going on. What would come next? The whole business is not worth it; life is not worth the trouble after all.’ After completing this entry, he poured himself a glass of chocolate milk, added cyanide, and sat down on his lawn to drink it.

  In 1987, another ‘sex slave’ case made headlines across America; this time it had ended in two fatalities. The psychiatric evidence that emerged means that we know a great deal more about Gary Heidnik than about Melvin Rees or Albert Brust. But although a jury found him sane, there can be little doubt that Heidnik was as psychotic as Albert Fish. The case offers an example of yet another stratagem by which the unconscious mind deals with the problems of the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome.

  Towards midnight on 24 March 1987 a black prostitute, Josefina Rivera, knocked frantically on the door of her boyfriend’s apartment in Philadelphia. Vincent Nelson had not seen her since the previous November, when she had gone out on a rainy evening to ‘turn a trick’. Now he was shocked to see how much she had changed in four months; she looked like a concentration-camp victim. He was even more startled by the words she was babbling – his first suspicion was that she was full of drugs. She seemed to be saying that three women were being kept chained up in a basement, and that two more were dead. Nelson finally called the police. The two men who arrived in a squad car were at first equally sceptical; but when she showed them marks around her ankles where she had been manacled, they decided that it might be worth investigating after all. The house in which Josefina alleged she had been held was three blocks away, on a slum street called North Marshall. A thin-faced, bearded man opened the door, and raised his hands when he saw drawn guns. Had they come about his child support payments? he wanted to know. The policeman assured him it was more serious, and took him to headquarters – the Sex Crimes Unit. His name was Gary Michael Heidnik, and he was forty-three years old.