by Colin Wilson
At that moment a van came over the hill, and Onions ran in front of it. The driver, Joanne Berry, with her four children and her sister’s child, was forced to stop. Onions clambered through a sliding door in the back and begged her to drive on. ‘He’s got a gun.’ As they drove off, they saw the man run to his own car and drive off.
Joanne Berry took Onions to Bowral police station, where he reported the incident. But, oddly, no action was taken, and when Onions left Australia five months later, he had still not heard a word from the police. In fact, the report on the attack had been mislaid.
Four years later, Onions heard about the hunt for the backpacker killer, and rang the New South Wales police. His description of ‘Bill’ proved to fit Ivan Milat, and after Milat’s arrest, Onions flew to Australia and identified Milat as his assailant. A blue shirt found in Milat’s garage was tentatively identified by Onions as the one he left behind in Milat’s car.
Milat was a roadworker who was apparently obsessed by hunting and guns. He was born on 27 December 1944, the son of an Australian mother and Croat father. The family consisted of ten boys and four girls, and the boys were always in trouble with the law. In his twenties, Milat was charged with car theft and breaking and entering, and went to prison several times.
In 1971 Milat was suddenly in more serious trouble. He picked up two female hitch-hikers, both in their late teens. Both women were under medication for depression, and neither noticed when Milat turned off the highway. He stopped, produced two knives and two pieces of rope, and announced that he intended to have sex with them both, or that he would kill them. One of the girls, aged eighteen, agreed, and allowed Milat to have sex with her on the front seat.
When Milat stopped at a petrol station, the girl ran inside and told the attendant that she had been raped, and that the driver was holding her friend. Several employees of the station ran out, and when the other girl scrambled out of the car, Milat drove off at speed. When he was pulled over later by police, there were no knives in the car, and although he admitted having sex with the girl, he claimed that it was with her consent. In any case, he said, the girls were both screwy.
Milat, who was already on two charges of armed robbery – one of a bank – now fled to New Zealand, and he was not brought back and tried until 1974. He was cleared on the various charges and freed. (One of his brothers went to prison for the bank robbery.)
In 1979, Milat gave a lift to two women hitch-hiking along the Hume Highway, then pulled off the road near the Belanglo State Forest and said: ‘OK, which of you girls wants it first?’ They fought back and ran into the bush; Milat tried for two hours to find them. Yet neither woman reported the attack until the Backpacker Task Force was set up fifteen years later.
Milat, it seems, was a ‘control freak’; in common with Fred West, he wanted to see his victims bound and gagged. There was evidence that, as he killed more and more victims, he enjoyed taking more time over it – half a dozen cigarette butts were found near the scene of one murder. Some victims were paralysed by being stabbed in the spine, then sexually assaulted and killed at leisure – both men and women were raped. (The judge at the trial would not give full details of the injuries, in order to spare relatives.)
A friend of Milat’s ex-wife Karen gave evidence that suggests that Milat was another ‘Right Man’, who demanded total obedience; Milat was obsessive about keeping the house neat and tidy, and when Karen was sent shopping with a list, she had to stick to every item on it, or risk him flying into a violent rage. She had to ask him for every penny she spent, account for every minute of her time, and bring back receipts for everything. Milat’s younger brother George – who later went on record as saying that his brother must now pay the price of his crimes – reports that Milat would fly into a rage with his wife wherever they happened to be, and that on one occasion, after knocking a cup of coffee over, he called her a stupid bitch.
When Karen walked out, and Milat could not find her, he burnt down the garage of her parents.
It was soon after his wife left him, in 1989, that he began the murders.
The trial of ‘Ivan the Terrible’ (as the press inevitably dubbed him) lasted for four months, and ended on 27 July 1996, when Milat was found guilty on all seven counts, and sentenced to life imprisonment by Judge David Hunt. Hunt also commented that he was convinced that Milat had not acted alone. In fact, Milat’s barrister had already suggested in court that the murders had been committed by Milat’s brothers Walter and Richard. And in a television interview on the day after the trial, these two brothers were accused by the interviewer of being accomplices.
Although the ‘Backpacker Killer’ is now in prison, most Australians feel strongly that the full truth about the murders has still not been fully revealed.
Donald ‘Pee Wee’ Gaskins
Arguably the nastiest known serial killer of modern times – if sheer number of victims and sadism of murders are the deciding factors – was a harmless-looking little man with a high voice called Donald ‘Pee Wee’ Gaskins. An unimaginable sadist, he tortured over a hundred victims to death.
Born in the backwoods of South Carolina in 1933, Gaskins came to the attention of a writer named Wilton Earle in the 1980s, when Gaskins was under sentence of death. He had been originally locked up for killing a number of ‘business associates’, people involved with him in a racket involving respraying and selling stolen cars, but he had escaped an execution sentence only to re-earn a place on Death Row for daringly killing a fellow inmate. Earle, impressed by the elaborate way in which Gaskins had committed this murder, wrote to ask him if he would like to dictate his autobiography. Gaskins invited Earle to visit him in prison and, in unsupervised conversations, revealed that he was a sadistic killer who had tortured dozens of victims to death.
This claim that he tortured victims until they died was in itself unusual; most serial killers are actually quite cowardly at the point of murder and, fearing discovery or being hurt themselves by their victims, they generally kill as quickly as possible. Many serial killers, as we’ve seen in this book, like to mutilate their victims, but this is almost invariably done after the victim is safely dead and therefore silent and unresisting.
Gaskins, on the other hand, was the sort of monster that the Gestapo would have loved to have recruited. Making sure that he had his victims away from all possible help, he would experiment with cruelty until they either died of shock and exertion or he finally put them out of their misery. He told the horrified Wilton Earle that he had killed victims with crushing, strangulation, cutting and stabbing with blades, poisoning, drowning, beating them to death with his fists and shooting them in the head execution style. A particular favourite of Gaskins’ was to cut off pieces of flesh from a victim and then cook and eat the fragment in front of them while they were still alive.
Gaskins’ confessions, published by Earle in a book called Final Truth, were so appalling that transcribing them gave Earle a nervous breakdown. The book was published after Gaskins was electrocuted in September 1991.
At least some blame for the creation of such a monster must go to the brutality of the American penal system itself. Sent to reform school for burglary as a teenager, Gaskins was soon gang-raped by twenty youths. Only five foot, four inches tall – thus his nickname ‘Pee Wee’ – he was an easy target for bullies and sex abusers. This was the first of many terms in prison, during which time he became a dangerous man in his own right. Prisons are often called ‘schools of crime’, and Gaskins was a star pupil. He eventually compelled the frightened respect of fellow inmates when he murdered a particularly dangerous prisoner, one of the jail’s ‘power men’. (In fact, always a clever killer, Gaskins murdered him while he was all but defenceless – the man was sitting on the toilet at the time.)
In the mid-1960s Gaskins was imprisoned for the statutory rape of a twelve-year-old girl named Patsy. A week later, he had escaped by jumping from an open window of a second storey waiting room in the Florence County courtroom.
He was at liberty for six months before being recaptured and sentenced to four years in the South Carolina Central Correctional Institution. He was released in 1969.
After this, he resolved that, in future, if he ever decided to rape another woman, he had better kill her too and hide the body. The first time he did this, he later told Earle, he was so carried away by the sensation of power that he became hooked and started to rape and murder women regularly – in fact, he claimed that he felt the undeniable need to rape and kill every six weeks.
In November 1970, Gaskins was questioned by the police about the disappearance of his own 15-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, but he denied all knowledge of her wherea bouts. Police had to drop the matter due to lack of evidence.
A month later he was again under suspicion – this time, for a horrifying sex murder. A 13-year-old girl named Peggy Cuttino, daughter of a prominent local politician, had disappeared in the small town of Sumter; her mutilated and tortured body was found in a ditch. Again, Gaskins was questioned and released.
In late 1975, Charleston police became worried over the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl named Kim Ghelkins, last seen leaving her home with an overnight bag. It was hoped that she had simply run-away from home, but when some of Kim’s clothes were found in a mobile home rented by Gaskins – whose stepdaughter was a friend of Kim’s – a warrant was issued for him.
Gaskins was arrested on 14 November 1975, and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Yet, even on this relatively lesser charge, police were unable to find enough evidence to charge him. Fortunately, just as they were preparing to let him go, his trusted friend Walter Neely suddenly became a born again Christian, and decided to tell everything he knew.
That same afternoon – 4 December 1975 – Neely led the police to the graves of two young men who had been shot in the head and buried in a swamp. The following day he led them to four more corpses, two men and two women. On 10 December, Neely was able to help them locate two more graves.
All these victims turned out to be associates of Neely and Gaskins in the stolen car fencing racket. Neely told the police that Gaskins had killed them all for business-related matters, so Gaskins was presented at his trial by prosecutors as a gangland assassin, not the serial killer that he in fact was, over and above his gangster activities.
On 24 May 1976, Gaskins went on trial in the Florence County Courthouse, and was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
On Death Row, Gaskins began to think hard about how he could escape execution. One possibility was to confess to more murders, and engage in plea bargaining. So he confessed to the murder of his niece, Janice, and her friend, Patty Ann Alsbrook. He claimed he had killed them as a result of an argument when he had caught them taking drugs. (In fact, as he later admitted to Wilton Earle, both had been sex crimes.) In exchange for his confession, Gaskins’ death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. With eleven murders to his credit – and dozens as yet unknown – he prepared to face a lifetime behind bars.
In late 1980, there came a welcome diversion. He was asked if he would undertake to murder a fellow prisoner, Rudolph Tyner, a 24-year-old drug addict, who had killed an old couple in the course of holding up their grocery store. Tyner was on Death Row, but hoped that the sentence would be commuted to life.
The son of his victims, Tony Cimo, was embittered at the thought of Tyner escaping the electric chair, and decided to take justice into his own hands. Through a friend of a friend, he approached Gaskins. Bored and frustrated, Gaskins rose to the challenge of committing a murder under the nose of the warders.
The first step was to get to know Tyner and gain his trust, which Gaskins did by slipping him hashish. The murder itself was brilliant – and bizarre – in its ingenuity. Gaskins suggested he install a home-made telephone between their cells, running through a heating duct. Tyner’s phone contained plastic explosive. When, at a prearranged time, Tyner said: ‘Over to you’, Gaskins plugged his end of the wire into an electric socket . . . the explosion rocked the whole cell block and Tyner was blown to pieces.
The authorities were so shocked by such a freakishly violent death in the most secure part of the prison that they initially believed that it had been the result of an accident of some kind. Then the evidence of plastic explosives was found and the prisoners’ rumours of murder began to be picked up. Tony Cimo, the most likely person to want Tyner dead, was arrested and confessed everything. He and Gaskins stood trial for the murder of Rudolph Tyner. Cimo received eight years. Gaskins was sentenced to the electric chair.
During his early days in prison, after his arrest for the murder of Kim Ghelkins, Gaskins had often been interviewed by reporters; now he was almost forgotten – a mere car thief and contract killer who had murdered a number of crooked business acquaintances. One or two criminologists had talked about writing about him, but it had all come to nothing. But Gaskins disliked his loss of celebrity status; as, knowing that he was, in fact, South Carolina’s worst mass murderer, he felt he deserved to be famous.
So when, in 1990, he was approached by author Wilton Earle, who felt that his story might be worth telling, Gaskins cautiously agreed. He was running out of appeals, and guessed that his appointment with the electric chair could not be long delayed – a year at the most. As he came to trust him, Gaskins agreed to tell Earle what he called the ‘final truth’. But there was one stipulation: that nothing should be published until after Gaskins had been executed. Among other things, his rape of a small child and the murder of at least one baby would disgust even his fellow Death Row prisoners. Even if he was not himself killed for being a paedophile, his last days before he was executed would be made hellish by their loathing.
Earle agreed. What he did not know when they made the agreement was that he was about to hear the most appalling and terrifying story of serial murder in the history of twentieth century crime. What was revealed over many sessions with the tape recorder was that Gaskins was a compulsive and sadistic sex killer, whose list of victims amounted to well over a hundred – Gaskins himself was uncertain just how many. The details of the ‘final truth’ were often so nauseating and horrific that Earle must have doubted many times whether they could be published.
Gaskins’ problem, as it emerged in the tapes, had always been an overdeveloped sex impulse. His need for sex was so powerful and compulsive that, whenever it came to him, he experienced a heavy feeling that rolled from his stomach up to his brain, and down again. He compared it to the pain women suffer before menstruation. When this happened, he would drive up and down the coastal highway looking for female hitchhikers.
But having served two terms for rape, he had vowed it should never happen again. His solution was simple: to kill his victims. And having raped and killed his first hitchhiker with a knife, he quickly discovered that torture and murder were becoming an addiction. After a while, it made no difference whether the victim was male or female, adult or small child; it was the torture – and the sense of power – that gave him pleasure. In effect, he became a character out of one of Sade’s novels, working out new ways to satisfy his desire to hurt and degrade.
Gaskins estimated that in the six years between September 1969 and his arrest in November 1975, he had committed between eighty and ninety ‘coastal kills’, an average of fourteen a year. He distinguished these murders of hitch-hikers picked up on the coast road from his ‘serious murders’, those committed for business or personal motives like revenge.
Hours before his execution on 6 September 1991, Gaskins tried to commit suicide with a razor blade that he had swallowed the previous week, then regurgitated. He was found in time, and given twenty stitches. Soon after midnight, he walked into the execution chamber without help, and sat in the chair. After his wrist and ankles had been strapped, a metal headpiece was placed on his skull, with a wet sponge inside it. Before the black hood was placed over his head he gave a thumbs-up salute to his lawyer. Three buttons were then pressed by three men – so that
none of them would be sure who had been responsible for the execution.
The BTK Strangler
Wichita, the largest city in Kansas, is a mid-sized and prosperous community with half a million inhabitants and a low crime rate; the last place in the world you would associate with sadistic murder.
That changed suddenly after 15 January 1972, the date of one of the most horrific crimes in the history of the mid-west. On that day, 15-year-old Charles Otero returned from school to find that his mother, father and two siblings had been killed. His mother and father, their wrists and ankles bound, lay dead in their bedroom. His 9-year-old brother Joe, wearing a hood, was dead in his bedroom. His 11-year-old sister Josephine had been hanged from a pipe in the basement, wearing only a shirt and socks. Two more children – Danny, 15, and Carmen, 13 – had also been at school during the killing spree.
Although there were semen traces all over the house, there had been no rape. Since all four had been strangled with cords, it looked as if the killer was a sadist who gained pleasure from the act of strangulation, and the sense of power it gave him to watch people suffer. This had been a well-known sexual perversion since the case of the strangler Vincent Verzeni was described in Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1886. The killer had probably used a gun to gain control, then taken his time – about an hour and a half – in terrorising and killing the victims. It seemed likely he had gained entrance when the father – 38-year-old Puerto Rican Joseph Otero – was taking Charlie and two more children to school. He had then tied up the mother, Julie, 34, and her two children, and waited for Joseph to return. It had obviously been carefully planned.