by Sue Russell
Realistically, there is as much chance of winning the Lotto or of being struck by lightning (or, for that matter, of being murdered by one’s own spouse) as there is of falling prey to a serial killer. Yet their modus operandi threatens us. Unlike mass murderers who kill a number of people in one impulsive, isolated spree, serial killers threaten us with the implicit message that they will kill again, and again, and again … until stopped.
The seemingly unfathomable way they operate, striking in an apparently random fashion without visible motive, chills our blood. But, to some extent, they are fathomable—and they certainly have motives. Figuring out that motive lights up a pathway to catching them.
Chicagoan, Robert Ressler, co-founder of the FBI’s psychological profiling programme and one of the country’s pre-eminent authorities on serial murderers, has over thirty years in criminology and was credited with coining the term ‘serial killer’. Ressler began teaching at the FBI training academy in 1974 and was a supervisory Special Agent at Quantico, Virginia, until, in 1990, he left to set up shop as a private consultant. That his business is flourishing is a sad testament to the violent state of the world in which we live. During his FBI years, Ressler pioneered criminal profiling and was behind establishing the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) and the FBI’s Criminal Personality Research Project. The latter led to the book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, by Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, and John E. Douglas: a handbook on catching and understanding sexual serial killers.
The Special Agents in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, first began profiling such criminals back in the early seventies, culling information from crime scenes to learn more about the offenders and looking for common factors. The engaging question of what lies in the mind of a serial murderer stimulates more than idle or voyeuristic curiosity: their psychological fingerprints help lead to their capture.
Local police forces, detectives, investigators and federal agents alike, turn regularly for help to the data available to all law enforcement via the FBI’s computerised clearing-house.
During his time at the BSU, Robert Ressler put the magnifying glass to more serial killers than any other human being walking the streets. He came the hard way to his conclusion that serial killers (once labelled ‘lust killers’) always operate from sexual motives, be they blatant or hidden. Just because a murderer does not rape a victim does not mean the sexual motive isn’t there. Overtly, there may be physical evidence that a male killer had sex with the victims; the victims may be disrobed or positioned in a sexual manner, their bodies may bear semen. More covertly, the killer’s sexual arousal can come, for example, from torture, from overkill (using more bullets or stab wounds, say, than is necessary to kill), or from dismembering a corpse.
For male serial murderers, the issues of power and sex become highly and inextricably intertwined. The feeling of power being sexually arousing. As with rape, so with serial murder: the manner in which that arousal is come by has more to do with violence than with sex.
Where Robert Ressler’s expertise falls short, as he’d readily admit, is in the area of women serial killers. A largely uncharted territory.
Ressler, who says he didn’t feel qualified to draw any conclusions about serial killers until he’d interviewed, in depth, over fifty of them, insists that there are ‘no hard and fast rules in the serial murder game’ and accuses journalists and writers of repeatedly over-simplifying. Yes, Ted Bundy’s victims did look alike, with their curtains of long, brown hair, but for every such example, Ressler can find its antithesis. Whether it’s concluding that all serial killers emerged from impoverished homes or all were sexually victimised as children, Ressler strongly discourages generalisations.
His is a world full of ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’ and ‘mosts’. ‘So, when people start talking about rules and serial killing, they just don’t really know their business,’ he says flatly.
The definitions laid out in Ressler’s book were formulated from a study of 36 male serial and sexual killers. Traditionally, women have not met those same criteria, and simply to transfer the serial killer label, based as it is on a male sample, and apply it to a female multiple or serial killer is like mixing apples and oranges.
Would Ressler’s underlying sexual motive theory hold water for Aileen Wuornos? Quite possibly. At any rate, the label ‘female serial killer’ is not a misnomer in her case. She is unarguably female. She is also a serial killer who meets the FBI criteria of having killed three or more times, in more than three different locations, on more than three separate occasions, with a cooling-off period in between.
‘Aileen Wuornos is the first one that would be defined as a serial killer based on the model of, say, Ted Bundy or someone like that,’ Ressler observes, ‘where they’re separate events, separate times and locations, and in fact seeking out an individual and killing them for whatever reasons. There’s just no comparison for Aileen Wuornos.’
Women do not customarily plumb the depths of depravity and sexual sadism either, mutilating their victims in horrific fashion. Carol Bundy, lover of Doug Clark, the man nicknamed the Sunset Slayer, decapitated her neighbour (and sometime lover) and helped Clark murder a prostitute.
Two factors are unusual with Bundy. First, she voiced the unthinkable, actually telling police that killing was ‘fun’. When she talked on the telephone to a police officer prior to her arrest, she told him, ‘The honest truth is, it’s fun to kill people, and if I was allowed to run loose, I’d probably do it again.’
Secondly, she shot her neighbour twice in the head, stabbed him more than twenty times, sliced his buttocks, then decapitated him. Trophy-style, she took his head with her. She claimed she wanted to make the crime look gory.
Like Aileen Wuornos, Carol Bundy began shoplifting at a tender age, and has made various attempts at suicide. Unlike Carol Bundy, Aileen Wuornos apparently did not mutilate her victims. But when she fired nine bullets into Charles Carskaddon and seven into Dick Humphreys, she certainly journeyed into the province of overkill.
If Aileen Wuornos is only the first of a new breed of murderous woman, the potential ramifications for society are horrifying, but Robert Ressler isn’t predicting an epidemic. Far from it. It’s his belief that women are not capable, either psychologically, sociologically, or physiologically, of moving into what for centuries has been the largely unchallenged domain of men. He cannot see areas such as rape, or even property crimes, being infiltrated by women on a large scale.
‘At the same time, because of the evolution of violence in society across the board, I think that it’s very appropriate that she has done this right here in the emergence of the nineties, and on into the year 2000. Because I think that throughout the decade of the nineties, and beyond the year 2000, we’re going to see more Aileen Wuornoses.
‘We’ve had women now who have shot up shopping centres. Sylvia Seegrist in Pennsylvania. We had a 16-year-old girl shooting up the school yard in San Diego. We’re seeing women doing these violent, male-type things, but we’re still only seeing one here and one there. We’re not seeing it on the media on a daily basis. We’re seeing women who are sexually assaulting and abusing children, but again, it becomes a speck of sand, compared to a beach of sand with men.’
As a known prostitute, some of whose victims were nude, Aileen’s crimes immediately took on a sexual connotation. Condoms were found at one crime scene. Yet contrary to this superficially sexual picture, it is not definitely known whether Aileen Wuornos was a sexual serial killer. We may assume that at least one of her male victims completed a sexual act, and with the naked victims, we may assume some sexual activity took place, but those assumptions are only assumptions and ultimately tell us nothing definite about the female aggressor’s state of sexual arousal … or lack thereof.
Males leave a calling card of tangible evidence of their arousal on or near their victims in the form of semen. Women offer up no such clues.
The vast preponderance of the research done on arousal responses to violent sexual imagery has been, of course, on males. One University of California Los Angeles study found that 30 per cent of men (not criminals or offenders, just men) responded to portrayals of violence against women by becoming sexually aroused, the researchers’ deduction being that they fantasise about those kinds of violence. But it is important to note that being aroused by a particular fantasy is not in and of itself a sign of perversion. The dividing line between normal sexuality and perversion is foggy, but one rule of thumb is that it’s a perversion when an aberrant fantasy must be brought to mind in order to facilitate sexual arousal and orgasm.
In 1991, a study was published by a group of Australian psychologists on women and fantasy: the first objective study, in that it measured genital blood flow in some of its subjects during sexual fantasies. (Once again, the research was not of female criminals or offenders.) We don’t know whether Aileen Wuornos’s body responded with sexual arousal and release on her killing days. It would be enlightening to know, but we don’t.
It is plausible and indeed likely that her ‘killing days’ were precipitated by personal crises or extra stresses in her home life. As her feelings of powerlessness heightened, those feelings could in turn have triggered an escalation in her need to exert control over another human being. Male serial killers commonly admit that an argument with a woman or parent preceded a murder. Of those in the FBI study 59 per cent specifically mentioned conflict with a woman. Lee had direct conflicts and problems with Ty at the time of the murders of Mallory, Spears, Carskaddon, Siems, Humphreys and Antonio. Either Ty was threatening to leave, or the presence of a competing force for Ty’s affections had made Lee fear she might.
Sandy Russell appeared in Ty’s life just a few days before Lee killed Richard Mallory. When Tracey visited, Lee killed David Spears, Charles Carskaddon and Peter Siems. Ty was fired by the Casa Del Mar and talking about leaving Lee and Florida in the week preceding the murder of Dick Humphreys. Ty had left for Ohio for Thanksgiving with talk about making a break from Lee when Lee killed Walter Gino Antonio. It is not a great stretch to imagine that something was afoot between them at the end of July when Lee murdered Troy Burress.
Candice Skrapec, a Canadian psychologist who teaches criminology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has interviewed serial killers and has been studying them since 1984. She points out that there is no single explanation, motive, or factor, but many.
‘Human behaviour is so complex,’ she says. ‘It’s a product of our biology, our psychological make-up, and our environment, and how those things interact with one another.’
If Aileen’s abandonment fears were triggered, they could indeed be very powerful and become a predominant motivating theme. If she was finding herself less effective as a prostitute as she got older and put on more weight, she might well be more vulnerable. And when those feelings surfaced, even subconsciously, they might well fit into the equation. Then opportunity occurs: meeting a man with over $300. Suddenly, it’s a homicide, rather than a prostitute and a potential client.
Skrapec points out that there were probably many occasions when such stress factors were in place and Lee did not kill. ‘So what is the difference? Is it opportunity?’
Did Lee find herself confronting a potential victim but, not having left the house that day feeling threatened, let the opportunity pass her by? Faced with opportunity, perhaps something one man said or did triggered her in a way another did not.
Clearly, given her longtime lifestyle, Lee spent a lot of time in the woods with a lot of men she did not kill. She had opportunities she did not take. When she did take a life, almost all the victims we know of had in common the fact that they were carrying rather large sums of cash. There were two possible exceptions. Charles Carskaddon, Lee claimed, had only around $20. Yet there is no reason to doubt Florence Carskaddon’s belief that her son should have had approximately $300. It would be more logical given the long journey he was making.
Dick Humphreys, Shirley believed, had only around $45 on him the day he was murdered, but ask most women to tell you how much cash their husbands have in their pockets at any given moment and they will be wrong. Unlike some of the other victims, Dick was moving around locally and did not need a large sum, yet people often carry around some extra undeclared cash for no other reason than the feeling of security it gives, of being prepared. He might have had more.
When spinning her tales to the men who picked her up, when chatting to them in their cars, perhaps she somehow elicited from them the fact that they had a considerable amount of cash on them. Perhaps that knowledge played a part in determining her killing days.
Perhaps, in times of pressure, she went back to what she’d always done, even as a child, and tried to empower herself with money. To avert her loneliness and isolation by having cash. Maybe it was to try to soothe Ty and ensure her continued presence that she wanted to take home a wad of bills.
Robert Ressler’s studies have led him to conclude that serial killers themselves do not have the introspective capability to understand or reflect on what triggered their crimes. If Richard Mallory were indeed her first victim, her reasons for killing him ranged from the rape and brutalisation story to the accusation that he didn’t pay her, to the accusation that he had paid but she was afraid he’d take his money back, to the fact that he wouldn’t take his pants off.
The sexual serial killers studied, however, were driven by their fantasies, and, although the research thus far pertains to men, Ressler suspects females may turn out to be similar to males in this area.
He has learned that with serial murder, ‘You just don’t start thinking about it and then start doing it.’ The bizarre thinking might gestate for eight, ten, or even more years before it’s acted upon. And ‘unaddressed traumatic and early damaging experiences to the murderers as children set in motion certain thinking patterns’.
While Ressler cannot speak for the Lee Wuornos case specifically, the BSU has learned the following, he says: ‘Life circumstances all shape the direction that these people go, and, generally speaking, there are precipitating stress factors that will move a person towards acting out their bizarre thoughts. A divorce, job loss, some financial setback, loss of loved ones, something like that. In other words, a normal person has all these circumstances happening to them, but they don’t have the early bizarre fantasy development, and hatred, and hostility, and anxiety and a need for dominating and controlling people.
‘When all these criteria are in line, and then you start having these events, say, after this has been around for ten or twelve years, you’ll find that these people gravitate towards moving to acting out. And once they act out, and if they find their act satisfying, they desire to repeat it … and they start considering the repetition of their crime.’
Skrapec points out that after Wuornos began killing, she remained a person continuing to experience the world, and that each experience could shape her future behaviour.
‘As she becomes more empowered, for example, by these killings—“Look what I can do!”—then that could even change future killings in terms of what precipitated them. Whether she chooses to kill one person and not another.’
Aileen Wuornos exhibits something that Skrapec has observed as predominant in male serial killers, but not in females, and that’s a sense of entitlement. It may have begun quite differently. As a child she was treated unfairly and reprehensibly by the males around her and was indeed entitled to better, and perhaps may have been bright enough to realise it. That, coupled with anger, may have been transform
ed into a sense of righteous entitlement. The media coverage would feed that. And as her killings progressed, by, say, the fourth rather than the second, that sense of entitlement, that sense that she had every right to do this for herself, might have grown too.
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It’s tempting to jump on the bandwagon and conclude that as Lee took the lives of her victims, somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind, she was killing her abusive grandfather over and over again. Lauri was 45 when she was born, 56 when she began her sexual acting out and 65 when he died—in the age range of her victims. And male serial killers do sometimes, but not always, seek victims that are in some sense symbolic of a person who has harmed them.
Ted Bundy, who was electrocuted in Florida in 1989, confessed to further murders before he died. He killed, it is believed, over thirty times, and his young, female victims certainly shared the parted curtain of long, brown hair, worn by his rejecting first love. But Aileen’s whole client base was focused on middle-aged men, and most lived to tell the tale. She herself was furious when she learned that her trail of carnage was being blamed on her rage at men stemming from being abandoned by her father and emotionally abandoned and abused by her grandfather. One suspects, however, that her outrage related to control. She couldn’t accept that theory because it wasn’t her own. She liked to control everything, especially her own life story. But in this instance, she may be right.
What was at work in the selection of her victims may just as easily have been the trouble at home overlaid by the client’s available cash, for argument’s sake. Or a casual remark about her being ‘crazy’. Or her indignation at a wrong remark made about her worth. In her chat with undercover officer Karen Collins in jail, she’d said: ‘I’m worth more than twenty dollars.’