by Colin Wilson
Dahmer came to court in January 1992, charged with fifteen murders. After being sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment, he commented: ‘I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.’
Dahmer was murdered in Wisconsin jail on 28 November 1994. He was hit on the head with an iron bar by fellow convict Christopher Scarver, who believed he was the Son of God.
Aileen Wuornos
Aileen (‘Lee’) Wuornos has been described as the world’s first female serial killer, but this is not strictly accurate. To begin with, there have been others – Anna Zwanziger, Jeanne Weber, Belle Gunness. But secondly, Aileen Wuornos was not a serial killer within the definition offered in this book: an obsessive ‘repeat killer’ driven by sex. Her motive in killing seven men was robbery.
Two days before Christmas in 1989, two friends came upon a badly decomposed body in woods near Ormond Beach, Florida; it was identified as a 51-year-old electrician named Richard Mallory. He had been shot four times with a .22 revolver.
During the next twelve months, five more victims were found in almost identical circumstances: David Spears, 43 (1 June 1990), Charles Carskaddon, 40 (6 June 1990), Troy Burress, 50 (4 August 1990), Charles Humphreys, 56 (12 September 1990), and Walter Gino Antonio (19 November 1990). All had been killed in or near their cars, and money and valuables stolen. The same handgun had been used in all six killings. A 65-year-old part-time missionary, Peter Seims, had also vanished in early June.
On 4 July 1990, a car that was being driven too fast skidded off the road in Marion County, Florida, and ended in a field. Witnesses saw two women, one tall and blonde, the other short and brunette, get out and hurry away. The car proved to belong to the missing missionary, Peter Seims. Sketches were made from the descriptions of witnesses, and published in the press. Members of the public tipped off the police that the pair were probably Tyria (‘Ty’) J. Moore, 28, and her live-in lover, 34-year-old Aileen (‘Lee’) Wuornos.
Then the police found some of the belongings of the first victim, Richard Mallory, in a pawn shop. The pawn ticket bore a thumb print – obligatory in Florida – that proved to belong to Lee Wuornos.
Lee Wuornos was known as a hard-drinking butch lesbian who made a living as a prostitute, and spent her time playing pool in sleazy bars with long-haired motorcyclists. She was arrested on 9 January 1991 outside a bar. Tyria Moore was located at her sister’s home in Pennsylvania, but not arrested – the police had soon ascertained that she had been elsewhere at the time of most of the murders.
In return for immunity from prosecution as accessory after the fact, Ty led the police to the creek where Lee Wuornos had thrown the .22 revolver used in the murders. She then made bugged phone calls to her lover, urging her to confess. Lee, who was clearly deeply in love with Ty, finally agreed. On 16 January 1991, she made a three-hour video-taped confession to murdering the seven men – including Seims, whose body was never found.
Aileen Carol Wuornos had been brought up by her grandfather and grandmother – in Troy, Michigan – whom she believed to be her real parents; she was unaware that her mother had deserted her when she was a baby. She was also unaware that her true father was a child rapist who had hanged himself in prison. Her mother walked out on her two babies because she was unable to cope. Lee’s grandparents – both Finnish immigrants – were heavy drinkers, and her grandfather was a foul-tempered disciplinarian who turned her into a rebel who hated authority. Lee herself was highly dominant, and had a quick temper. At the age of eleven she lost her virginity to a local youth. Then, discovering that sex gave her power over boys, she plunged into it with an enthusiasm that soon earned her a reputation as the neighbourhood tart. She introduced her elder brother Keith to incest. And one local boy was surprised – and delighted – when a pretty girl in shorts slipped him a note offering a ‘suck and fuck’ in exchange for a packet of cigarettes. The eighteen-year-old youth who served in the local cigarette store often bartered a packet of cigarettes for oral sex in the back room. When the young man boasted about it to a group of friends, he was mortified to learn that Lee had performed the same service for all of them earlier the same day.
When she was fourteen, Lee became pregnant – she claimed she had been raped by an older man, but this seems doubtful. (Later she was even to name her brother as the baby’s father.) In the local maternity hospital, a caseworker made the memorable comment that Lee had ‘no concern for the future, only for what today would bring’.
Lee lacked self-control. When she lost her temper, she poured out a stream of foul language. She always carried a knife, and once, in a rage, screamed that she had already killed someone and chopped them up, then buried them in a field. It was something of a relief to the rest of the family when she drifted down to Florida.
Married at the age of twenty to a man nearly 50 years her senior, she was soon divorced due to her habit of spending the whole day in bars playing pool. At about this time, Aileen announced that she had discovered she was gay. There followed an affair with a woman called Toni. But her temper and her drunkenness made all her relationships brief. When, in 1981, she robbed a late-night supermarket, netting $35, she received three years in a correctional centre.
When she finally left Michigan, after her brother’s death from cancer, she hitch-hiked to Colorado and quickly found her way to bars frequented by bikers. She enjoyed the sensation of being a ‘biker’s moll’, a female outlaw riding on the back of a motorcycle and defying the world. One night she passed out from alcohol, and woke to find herself naked and tied to a bed; the whole gang had taken advantage of her while she was unconscious. Yet even this failed to upset her Bonnie-and-Clyde image of herself as the female outlaw.
For the next few years she continued to live out this image – working as a prostitute, getting arrested again and again for drink-driving, carrying a concealed weapon and brawling. Then, in June 1986, she found what she had been looking for all her life – someone to love.
She met Tyria (pronounced Tyra) Moore in a gay bar in Daytona Beach. Tyria was anything but good-looking, being overweight and big chinned, but she was stable, caring, and easy to get along with. Ty and Lee were instantly attracted to one another, and that same night Ty took Lee back to her bedroom. For almost three days they stayed in bed together, going out only to purchase a large dildo.
The relationship was basically that of man and wife, with Lee as the husband. Ty was working as a motel maid but Lee made her give it up; she would support her. Now, suddenly, she had an aim in life. Ty was both her wife and her child, and evoked an unselfishness that Lee was probably unaware she possessed.
Yet although this relationship gave her life new meaning, there was one major problem. A prostitute’s stock-in-trade is her physical attractiveness. Now in her 30s, Lee was grossly overweight, and her face showed the ravages of her outbursts of fury. It was becoming harder to pick up clients and she often accepted a mere $10 or $20 for sex. Yet she often hitch-hiked with johns who obviously had hundreds of dollars in their wallets. There was only one objection to turning highway-robber – that she would soon be recognised and caught. But there was an alluring alternative: to kill them and then take their wallets.
The drama of Lee Wuornos’ story spawned two movies, an opera and several books before she was executed by lethal injection on 9 October 2002. As she was lead out of the court, following her first conviction and death sentence in 1991, Wuornos had shouted: ‘I’m going to Heaven now. You’re all going to Hell!’
Shortly after her death, an anonymous joker posted a message on a website that was hosting an online discussion about her execution. Signed Satan, it simply read: ‘Umm . . . Could you guys take her back?’
Fred and Rose West
The Frederick West murder case has aroused more worldwide interest than any British case since Jack the Ripper.
Fred West was a builder who lived in a semi-detached house in Gloucester, with his plump and bespe
ctacled wife Rosemary, and a large number of children, three of them obviously half-caste. A short, powerfully built man with piercing blue eyes and a simian profile, he was known as a hard worker, devoted to DIY, and was always adding extensions to their house, 25 Cromwell Street, where they had been living since September 1972. In the early days the house had been full of lodgers, mostly men, although later lodgers were mainly female.
Between August 1992 and June 1993, Fred West had been in jail, accused of raping and sodomising one of his daughters, and the children were taken into care. During this period, his eldest daughter, 28-year-old Anne Marie (whose mother was not Rose), described to Detective Constable Hazel Savage how she herself had been taken down to the basement at the age of eight by her stepmother and father, and deflowered with a vibrator. Her father had started having sex with her when she was nine – on at least two occasions she had been held down by her stepmother Rose, on whom she had once been made to perform cunnilingus. It seemed that Rose also worked as a prostitute – not primarily for profit, but because her husband liked to watch her having sex with other men – and when Anne Marie was ten, she had also been forced to prostitute herself to male clients. (Many of these clients – particularly the black ones – were ‘freebies’, because Rose was as obsessed by sex as her husband was, and was virtually insatiable.) Anne Marie had finally run away from home when she was fifteen, after becoming pregnant by her father. (The baby was aborted.)
Together with the evidence of the daughter who had been raped, this testimony of Anne Marie seemed to provide the police with a watertight case against both the Wests. But aware of the misery of her half-brothers and sisters, who were longing to be home, Anne Marie finally withdrew her testimony. The consequence was that when, on 17 June 1993, Fred and Rose West stood side by side in the dock in Gloucester, they were acquitted for lack of evidence. (In fact, their acquittal did the younger children no good, for they were kept in care.)
It was a remark by one of these younger children that made Hazel Savage determined to pursue the case further. The child was overheard to say that they were not allowed to talk about what went on inside 25 Cromwell Street, for fear of ‘ending up under the patio, like my sister Heather’.
Heather West, the oldest child of Fred and Rose West, had not been seen since June 1987, when she was sixteen. According to the Wests, she had run away with a lesbian, and had gone to work in a holiday camp. But she had left her unemployment benefit uncollected, which sounded unlikely for a girl about to embark on a new life.
Hazel Savage’s superiors were unhappy at the idea of digging up the Wests’ garden, for if they didn’t find anything, they might sue for harassment. But the policewoman’s insistence finally prevailed, and on Thursday 24 February 1994, police arrived at 25 Cromwell Street with a search warrant. Fred West was at work, repairing a roof, and was located with some difficulty. He promised to come immediately, but in fact arrived many hours later – a delay that is still unexplained. (The likeliest explanation is that he went to another of his murder sites to cover his tracks.) West hurried to the police station, and told a reporter he met outside that he had not murdered his daughter Heather. Back at Cromwell Street, Rose was telling police that she had been out shopping when Heather had left home, so she had no first-hand knowledge of what had happened.
The Wests spent a gloomy night at 25 Cromwell Street, with a policeman sitting beside the excavation in the garden. Two of their elder children, Stephen and Mae, were there to keep them company.
The next day, when the police returned, Fred West unexpectedly volunteered to accompany them to the police station. In the car, he suddenly confessed to the murder of his daughter Heather. He claimed that Heather had been jeering at him so he put his hands on her throat ‘to wipe the smirk off her face’, then realised she was dead. He had cut up the body with a freezer knife, and later buried it at the bottom of the garden. He even went back to show the police where he had buried it. He told them they were wasting their time digging outside the bathroom, and directed them to the bottom of the garden.
It was not until the next day, Saturday, that the diggers smelt decaying flesh, and knew they had finally found Heather. She had, as Fred had claimed, been dismembered; her nails, found apart from the skeleton, suggesting that they had been pulled out, either before or after death. Certain fingers and toes were also missing.
What puzzled pathologist Dr Bernard Knight was that when he had reassembled the bones, like a jigsaw puzzle, he had a femur (thigh bone) left over. There had to be another body down there.
Told about this, West admitted that there were two more bodies buried in the garden – one of them a former lodger, Shirley Anne Robinson, a bisexual who had been carrying his baby. He was not sure of the name of the other, but referred to her as ‘Shirley’s mate’. She was buried near the bathroom wall – the spot he had tried to direct the police away from.
What had happened seems clear. Fred West had been hoping that only Heather’s remains would be found, and that he would be able to claim that it was an accident, and serve a few years in prison for manslaughter. Now they had found the extra femur, he had to perform a quick exercise in damage limitation. They knew there had to be a second body, and would certainly go on looking after they found it. So it would be better to admit to a third body, and then hope they would stop there . . .
More digging uncovered ‘Shirley’s mate’ – in fact a schoolgirl called Alison Chambers, who had disappeared in 1979 (and who, in fact, had never known Shirley), and Shirley Anne Robinson. Both bodies had been decapitated, both had missing fingers and toes, and Shirley’s baby had been cut from the womb. It was becoming increasingly clear that Fred West had some morbid obsession about mutilation and dismemberment – a kind of ‘butchery complex’.
Strongly suspecting that there were more bodies, the police now decided to dig up the basement of 25 Cromwell Street – to the disgust of Rose West, who threatened to sue for damage to her property. Five more bodies were found in the basement, and another under the floor of the outside bath-room, in what had once been the inspection pit of a garage.
West continued to insist that Rose knew nothing of the murders. But the police had reason to believe otherwise. In January 1973, both Wests had appeared in court on a charge of sexually assaulting and causing bodily harm to a seventeen-year-old girl called Caroline Raine. In November 1972, Caroline had been given a lift by the Wests and offered a job as their live-in nanny. She stayed only six weeks, because Fred talked endlessly about sex – abortion, lesbianism and group orgies – while Rose made passes at her and walked into the bathroom when she was naked. Soon after leaving, Caroline had seen the Wests in Tewkesbury, and had accepted a lift. Rose got in the back with her and began caressing her breasts. When Caroline objected, Fred stopped the car and punched her unconscious. She woke up with her hands tied with a scarf and her mouth taped. She was taken back to Cromwell Street and stripped naked. Fred flogged her between the thighs with the buckle end of a belt, then, while Rose performed oral sex, Fred had sex with Rose from behind. Later, when Rose left the room, Fred raped Caroline. But the next morning they begged her to return as their nanny. Caroline agreed because she saw that as her only chance to escape, but called on a friend and told her what had happened. At home, her mother, noticing her condition, persuaded her to tell the story, then rang the police.
But when Fred and Rose West appeared in court in January 1973, Caroline decided not to go through the public ordeal. The Wests were not charged with rape, but merely with assault, and fined £50 each.
The case of Caroline Raine convinced the police that Rose was an aggressive lesbian who had probably played an active part in the murders. This seemed confirmed by the evidence of another girl – known at the trial only as ‘Miss X’ – who had been in a children’s home in Gloucester, and met the Wests when she was thirteen. She had regarded Rose as a kind of elder sister, and often went to 25 Cromwell Street for tea and sympathy. Two years later, after runni
ng away from the home, she called on the Wests, and was taken by Rose into a bedroom with two naked girls. There she was stripped by Rose, and watched while one of the girls was taped, face downward, on the bed, and penetrated anally with a vibrator. After that, Fred West raped the girl, who was obviously terrified. Then it was Miss X’s turn; she was also taped down to the bed, and some hard object inserted in her anus, causing her to bleed. After that, Fred raped her vaginally, while Rose held his penis. Eventually, Miss X was allowed to go. She felt so angry and betrayed that six weeks later she took a can of petrol to the house, intending to set it on fire, but was unable to go through with it.
By now the police were looking into other disappearances – that of Fred’s first wife Catherine (known as Rena), Rena’s daughter Charmaine (who had last been seen in 1971, when she was eight), and that of a friend of Rena’s named Anna McFall, who had lived with Fred in a caravan in the mid-1960s, and become pregnant by him.
Fred eventually admitted to these three murders, and led the police to the bodies. Charmaine was found buried under the floor at their previous lodging, 25 Midland Road, in Gloucester – only a stone’s throw from Cromwell Street. Rena and Anna McFall were found buried in two adjoining fields near Fred’s childhood home in Much Marcle, Herefordshire.
When it became clear that Fred West had been in prison – for theft – at the time when Charmaine vanished, detectives concluded that Rose must have killed her, and left Fred to bury her when he came out of prison in June 1971. It also began to seem likely that West had murdered his first wife Rena because she was trying to find out what had happened to Charmaine.
All the bodies showed signs of Fred West’s strange ‘butchery complex’, with missing fingers and toes, as well as – occasionally – other bones like kneecaps or vertebrae.