The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  Among the hundreds of suspects interviewed by the police was Gary Leon Ridgway, 35, a mild-looking man with fishlike lips, who worked for the Kenworth Truck Plant and was known to pick up prostitutes – he even admitted being obsessed by them. He also confessed to choking a prostitute in 1982, but claimed this was because she bit him.

  By 1986, with the investigation stalled, Ridgway’s file was re-opened, and his ex-wife interviewed about his preference for sex in the open, often near the Green River. Ridgway was placed under surveillance. And still women disappeared – although no longer with quite the same frequency.

  In December 1988, a television special on the case, ‘Manhunt Live’, led to 4,000 tips from the public, and to the arrest of 38-year-old William J. Stevens, who had a criminal record. But although both police and media believed the Green River Killer had been arrested, credit card receipts proved Stevens had been elsewhere at the time of some of the murders, and he was released.

  And so throughout the 1990s, the case marked time, while Reichert, the chief investigator, admitted that his obsession with the killer had caused serious problems in his marriage.

  Genetic fingerprinting had first been used in 1986, and had led to the solution of many murders. The main problem was likely to occur if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old. In 2001, a major breakthrough came when the Washington State crime lab acquired the equipment to extract usable DNA from old samples and multiply the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats. (This is also known as the PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies genetic samples by ‘unzipping’ the double-stranded DNA molecule, and making two exact copies.)

  Now a major review of samples of semen evidence began. And by September 2001, it had paid off. Semen samples, taken from Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Carol Christensen, three of the earliest victims, proved to be from Gary Ridgway. Paint fragments and fibre evidence taken from the grave of Debra Estes in 1988 were also linked to Ridgway. So when Ridgway was finally arrested on 30 November 2001, he was charged with four counts of murder.

  At first pleading innocent, he later agreed to change his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty.

  Ridgway’s account of how he became a serial killer occupies the most fascinating chapter of Reichert’s book: Chasing the Devil. As with many killers, the problems seem to have started with his upbringing. He was a chronic bed-wetter, and his mother would drag him out of bed and parade him in front of his brothers, then make him stand naked in a tub of cold water. His father seems to have been a timid nonentity. But as an employee of a mortuary he strongly influenced his son’s fantasies by describing at length interrupting someone having sex with a corpse. Ridgway began to fantasise about this. When he saw his mother sunbathing he had imagined having sex with her, but now he dreamed of killing her and violating the body.

  Like so many serial killers he was sadistic to animals, and once killed a cat by locking it in a refrigerator. He also claimed that, as a teenager, he once drowned a little boy by wrapping his legs around him and pulling him under the water. And later he would stab and injure another small boy, although he was never caught.

  Joining the US Navy, Ridgway was sent to the Philippines, and there began to use prostitutes regularly. They quickly became his lifelong obsession.

  He had discovered he enjoyed choking people during a quarrel with his second wife, Marcia, when, on an angry impulse, he wrapped his arm round her neck from behind (a method also used by the Boston Strangler). In addition he enjoyed tying her up for sex. In 1975 they had a son, Matthew, whom he adored. A religious phase lasted until 1980, when they divorced. Yet, during their marriage, he constantly used prostitutes.

  He embarked on killing after his divorce. Because he seemed a feeble-looking ‘milquetoast’ his victims felt no alarm about him, and allowed him to get behind them. He often took them back to his house, had sex, and then killed them. Later, he found he preferred to kill them first and have sex with the bodies. He also confessed to revisiting bodies several times for more sex.

  He even admitted to a fantasy – never carried out – to overpower a prostitute then impale her with an upright pole inserted into her vagina; a favourite practice of the original Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler.

  This apparently innocuous little man was able to carry on killing for many years – partly because he looked so harmless, partly through luck and largely through the general incompetence shown by investigators and the media at the start of the investigation. Reichert emphasises that Ridgway was full of self-pity, regarding himself as the main helpless victim of his sinister urges.

  On 5 November 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 murders, and received 48 life sentences.

  Jack Unterweger

  Jack Unterweger, poet, dramatist and serial killer, qualifies as one of the strangest criminals of the twentieth century.

  From the point of view of law enforcement, his case began on 14 September 1990, when the naked body of a shop assistant, Blanka Bockova, was found on the banks of the Vltava River, near Prague. She had been beaten and strangled with stockings. Although lying on her back with legs apart, atampon was still in place, and there were no traces of semen. She had been out drinking with friends in Wenceslas Square the previous evening, but had decided not to leave with them at 11.45. The police were baffled; there were simply no leads.

  On New Year’s Eve 1991, in a forest near Graz, Austria, nearly 300 miles south of Prague, another woman was found strangled with her pantyhose. She was Heidemarie Hammerer, a prostitute who had vanished from Graz on 26 October 1990. Although fully clothed, there were signs that she had been undressed and then re-dressed after she was dead. Bruises on her wrist suggested rope or handcuffs. Again, no semen was present. Some red fibres found on her clothes were preserved as forensic evidence, as were minute particles of leather, probably from a jacket.

  Five days later, a badly decomposed woman was found in a forest north of Graz. She had been stabbed and strangled – again, probably with her pantyhose. She was identified as Brunhilde Masser, another prostitute.

  There was another disappearance from Graz on 7 March 1991, a prostitute named Elfriende Schrempf. Her decomposed body was found eight months later, on 5 October, in a forest near Graz. And still the police had no clue to this multiple killer of prostitutes.

  When four more prostitutes, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem and Karin Eroglu, disappeared in Vienna during the next month, it looked as if the killer had changed his location. Although the police claimed there was no established connection between the crimes, the press began to speak of a serial killer. They called him ‘the Vienna Courier’.

  And at this point, investigators found a vital lead. Ex-policeman August Schenner, retired for five years from the Vienna force, was reminded of the MO of a murderer he had met seventeen years earlier, in 1974. His name was Jack Unterweger, and he was now a famous writer and media personality.

  The case dated back to the time when Unterweger was 23. Two women had been strangled. The first, Margaret Schaefer, 18, was a friend of Barbara Scholz, a prostitute, who had turned him in. Scholz told how they had robbed Schaefer’s house, then taken her to the woods, where Unterweger had strangled her with her bra after she refused oral sex. He had left her naked and covered with leaves – just as in most of the more recent killings.

  The second 1970s victim, a prostitute named Marcia Horveth, had been strangled with her stockings and dumped in a lake. Unterweger was not charged with this murder, because he had already confessed to the first and had been sentenced to life. Nevertheless he had pleaded guilty to the murder of Horveth, claiming that as he was making love to her, he had seen the face of his mother before him. This, apparently, was his reason to kill her. A psychologist diagnosed him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic tendencies.

  Unterweger, a good-looking youth who was the son of a prostitute and an American GI, had been illiterate when he went to jail. He had alre
ady been in prison fifteen times, for offences including rape and car theft. He had even been a pimp. But in prison for life, he set about learning to read and write. Then he edited the prison newspaper, started a literary review, and wrote his autobiography, a book called Purgatory (‘Fegefeur’), which professed that he was totally rehabilitated, and had killed the prostitute because he hated his mother.

  The book made him an overnight literary celebrity and intellectuals began to lobby for his release. He was paroled on 23 May 1990, after sixteen years. And he was now a celebrity, who quickly became rich when his book was made into a movie. Since then he had written plays, had given readings of his poetry, and was a regular guest on TV talk shows. He habitually wore a white suit and drove expensive cars. Moreover, as a magazine writer, he had even interviewed the police about the ‘Vienna Courier’, and been critical of their failure to catch him. Could this charming, brilliant new literary celebrity be a serial killer?

  As they reviewed the evidence, the Vienna police – and especially a detective called Ernst Geiger – decided the answer had to be yes. To begin with, when they checked his credit card receipts to establish his whereabouts at the times of crimes, they learned that Unterweger was in Graz in October, when Brunhilde Masser was killed. And he was there again in March when Elfriede Schrempf vanished. He was also in Bregenz, from where Heidemarie Hammerer was taken, in December and, moreover, resembled the last person with whom she was seen.

  Unterweger had been in Prague the previous September, and when the police contacted their counterparts in Prague, they learned about the murder of Blanca Bockover. Of course, all this could hardly be coincidence. After months of secretly investigating the celebrity, investigators finally decided that it was time to show their hand.

  They interviewed Unterweger on 2 October 1991. Naturally, he denied everything. Moreover, he renewed criticism of the police for their failure to catch the Vienna Courier. Support for him among Viennese intellectuals and his society friends remained strong. (But how could they admit that their enthusiasm for his writing had unleashed a killer on Vienna? Was it not more likely, as Unterweger told them, that the authorities were persecuting this ex-criminal who had now become their scourge?)

  Undeterred, investigator Ernst Geiger went on with his search. Prostitutes who had been with Unterweger testified that he liked to handcuff them during sex – which was consistent with some of the marks on the wrists of the Vienna Courier’s victims. Police tracked down the BMW that Unterweger had bought on his release from prison, and found in it a dark hair with skin on the root. It was tiny, but using the PCR technique to make multiple copies of DNA, they were able to identify it as belonging to victim Blanca Bockover.

  A search of Unterweger’s apartment revealed a red scarf whose fibres matched those found on Bockover, as well as a leather jacket, and receipts from California, where Unterweger had gone to research a magazine article on prostitution in Hollywood. A check with the Los Angeles Police Department revealed that there had been three murders of prostitutes in the five weeks Unterweger was there, while the ‘Courier’s’ activities in Vienna ceased. All three women – Irene Rodriguez, Shannon Exley and Sherri Long – had been strangled with their bras and left out in the open.

  It seemed that Unweger had gone to the LAPD and introduced himself as a European writer researching red light areas. He went on with police in patrol cars, and was treated as a distinguished guest.

  It was time to arrest the suspect. In February 1992 a judge signed a warrant. But when the police arrived at his apartment, Unterweger was gone. They learned from his friends that he had gone on holiday with his latest girlfriend, 18-year-old Bianca Mrak, whom he had picked up in a restaurant, and with whom he had been living since the previous December.

  It seemed they had gone to Switzerland, and then, when friends tipped him off by telephone that there was a warrant out for him, to New York.

  Before leaving Europe, Unterweger had telephoned Vienna newspapers to insist that the police were trying to frame him. He also made an offer: if the officer in charge of the case would drop the warrant for his arrest, he would return voluntarily to ‘clear his name’. He had alibis, he said, for all the murders – on one occasion he had been giving a reading of his work.

  Unterweger and Bianca moved to Miami, Florida, and rented a beach apartment. They were running short of money, and Bianca took a job as a topless dancer. Bianca’s mother also kept them supplied with money by telegraph.

  When the police learned about this, they called on the mother, and prevailed on her to inform them the next time her daughter made contact. And when Bianca asked her mother to telegraph more cash to the Western Union office in Miami, two agents were waiting for them. The alert Unterweger spotted them and fled, urging Bianca to go in another direction. But he was caught after running through a restaurant, causing havoc, and out at the back, where an agent with a gun arrested him. When told he was wanted for making a false customs declaration in New York – he had failed to admit his prison record – he looked relieved. But when they added that he was also wanted in Vienna for murder, he began to sob.

  Learning that he was also wanted in California, where his semen had been found in one of the victims, Unterweger decided to resist extradition to Europe and opt for trial in Los Angeles. Then he was told that California – unlike Austria – had a death penalty. So he immediately changed his mind.

  Back in Vienna, the final outcome was inevitable. The strength of the evidence against him was overwhelming. As the trial – which began in April 1994 – dragged on for two and a half months, his support among journalists and former admirers began to ebb away. He failed to produce any of the unshakeable alibis he had promised. On 28 June 1994, a jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  American agent Gregg McCrary, who had been actively involved since 1992 as a psychological profiler, advised the Vienna police to keep a suicide watch on Unterweger, since he had frequently boasted that he would never spend another day in prison. They failed to heed his warning, and a few hours after being sentenced to life imprisonment, he hanged himself in his cell with the cord from his jumpsuit.

  Andrew Cunanan

  In 1994, the Hollywood director Oliver Stone released the movie Natural Born Killers – a deliberately shocking story of a young couple who travel around America brutally killing strangers for fun. A satire on the media’s casual attitude towards violence and murder, Stone’s film was clearly meant to be controversial, but perhaps he got more than he bargained for.

  The very media Stone was satirising became almost hysterical over the film, with television and newspaper pundits wailing that it could inspire weak-minded people (not themselves, of course) to become serial killers. On the whole this seems an unlikely possibility; as we have seen in this book, the path to becoming a serial killer usually involves being abused as an adolescent, followed by years of sadistic sexual fantasies – no movie could recreate such a psychological downward spiral in those who watched it. But within three years, the US was traumatised by a series of killings that seemed as random and heartless as any of those depicted in Stone’s film.

  The case started, some believe, when 28-eight-year-old male prostitute Andrew Cunanan began to suspect he had contracted AIDS. He went for a blood test in early 1997, but could not bring himself to collect the results. After that date his friends began to notice that the usually humorous and effervescent Cunanan seemed increasingly depressed – perhaps because he assumed that he indeed had the fatal disease.

  Another cause of depression in Cunanan was his jealous fear that two of his former boyfriends, Jeffrey Trail (a former Navy officer) and David Madson (a Minneapolis architect) were seeing each other behind his back. In an attempt to soothe his ex-lover’s suspicions, Madson invited Cunanan to fly from his home in San Diego to Minneapolis to meet with him and Trail to talk matters over. The meeting, on 27 April 1997 in Madson’s apartment, proved stormy and ended with Cunanan grabbing a meat
mallet from a kitchen drawer and beating Jeff Trail’s skull in.

  It is a mystery just why David Madson – a respected and successful professional – then helped Cunanan to roll the corpse in a rug, and then went on the run with the killer, but he did. The mystery will remain unsolved because Cunanan shot Madson dead and left him in a roadside ditch several days later. Ironically, the revolver Cunanan used had belonged to Jeff Trail.

  At this point, Andrew Cunanan seems to have decided to live the life of a carefree outlaw, and never made any particular effort to cover his tracks – even leaving photographs of himself in Madson’s Cherokee Jeep when he abandoned it in Danville, Illinois, a week after the murder of Jeff Trail.

  As he left no diaries, or similar indication to his mental workings, it is a matter of conjecture why Cunanan became a serial killer. However, his next killing almost certainly stemmed from a sick urge to re-enact a scene from one of the sadomasochistic pornographic videos he loved to watch (and had at least once ‘acted’ in).

  After abandoning Madson’s Jeep, he walked a few blocks and approached 72-year-old Chicago-based property developer Lee Miglin. Drawing his revolver, Cunanan forced Miglin into the garage of Miglin’s home and bound and gagged the old man with duct tape. Then, apparently recreating a scene from a video called Target for Torture, he beat and kicked Miglin, stabbed him several times in the chest with a pair of pruning shears, then slowly sawed the old man’s throat open with a hack saw. Cunanan then crushed the corpse to a pulp with Miglin’s own car – driving over it backwards and forwards several times. Then, after stealing some ornamental gold coins from the house, Cunanan simply drove off.

  Is this evidence that movies like Natural Born Killers and Target for Torture can turn people into serial killers? It would seem more likely that the sort of person who will eventually become a serial killer is highly likely to want to watch sadomasochistic movies. But sadists with no access to such material still become serial killers – so blaming the movies for serial crime is as over-simplistic as blaming wars on Hollywood, because the politicians who declare wars sometimes watch war movies.