A parallel case is that of Carroll Edward Cole, executed in Nevada on December 6, 1985, for two of his estimated thirty-five murders. Cole's first victim was a childhood playmate, drowned in 1946 or '47 for making fun of Cole's "girly" given name, but police dismissed that homicide as an accident, and Cole claimed no further victims until 1971. A year before his second murder, once again in Nevada, Cole approached Reno patrolmen and confessed his desire to rape and murder women. Officers advised him to seek psychiatric counseling, and he checked himself into Reno State Mental Health Hospital, where analysts pegged him as a "malingerer" craving free room and board from the state. Their "treatment" consisted of an express bus ticket to San Diego, California, where Cole killed his first adult victim in May 1971, rolling on from there to slay others in California, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Texas. Serving a life prison term in Texas, Cole confessed two Nevada slayings in 1984, waiving extradition in hopes of receiving the death penalty. When a court in Las Vegas obliged him, Cole replied, "Thanks, judge."
How many other cases over time have seen demented killers judged legally sane and imprisoned or executed?
"Vampire Killer" Richard Trenton Chase had a lifelong history of hypochondria, including delusions that his heart sometimes "stopped beating" and that "someone had stolen his pulmonary artery." He held raw oranges to his head, convinced that his brain could absorb Vitamin C by osmosis, and shaved his scalp in order to observe supposed shifting of his cranial bones. Leaving his mother's home in the belief that she had tried to poison him, Chase shared an apartment with friends until his alcoholism and drug abuse drove them away. Living alone at last, he captured, disemboweled, and devoured various animals, consuming their raw organs in Coca-Cola to prevent his heart from "shrinking" and his blood from "turning to powder." Between December 1977 and January 1978, Chase killed six residents of Sacramento, California, drinking their blood and devouring parts of their bodies, afterward turning up at shopping malls in blood-soaked clothing. Despite copious evidence of mental derangement, jurors rejected an insanity defense and convicted Chase on six counts of first-degree murder, resulting in a death sentence. Before he could be executed at San Quentin, Chase killed himself with an overdose of prescription drugs on December 26, 1980, at age thirty.
Another California case involves Herbert William Mullin, born in 1947. Devastated by the death of a high school friend, Mullin built a shrine in his bedroom and began obsessing over fears that he was gay, despite his ongoing heterosexual relationship with a girlfriend. Relatives committed him to a mental institution for the first time at age twenty-two, where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but he never stayed long in therapy. Between commitments, he stubbed out cigarettes on his own skin, failed in a bid to join the priesthood, and was once evicted from a flat for pounding on the floor, railing at nonexistent tenants downstairs. By 1972, disembodied voices were commanding Mullin to forestall a catastrophic earthquake by performing human sacrifices while he sang "The Die Song." (Mullin was born on the forty-first anniversary of San Francisco's tragic 1906 earthquake, survived by Earle Nelson.) Between October 1972 and February 1973, Mullin killed thirteen victims in and around Santa Cruz, California. One day before his scheduled trial, at which he planned to plead insanity, Mullin changed his mind and pled guilty to one count of second-degree murder, receiving a life prison term. At this writing, he remains incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Lone, California, where, if he survives long enough, he will be considered for parole in 2021, at age seventy-four.
Closer to Earle Nelson's time, in the 1930s, we have the case of "Moon Maniac" Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish, executed in New York's electric chair on January 16, 1936, at age sixty-five. A clearly aberrant character for decades, Fish included sadomasochism, pedophilia, cannibalism, urophilia, and coprophagia on his list of what one psychiatrist described as "every perversion known to man." The murder and consumption of a girl in 1928 led to Fish's arrest six years later, when he sent a taunting letter to the victim's parents and authorities traced the unique stationery. Before that crime, Fish may have killed at least nine other children and, by his own account, had molested youngsters "in every state" of the Union. In publishing his jailhouse confession, the New York Daily Mirror dubbed Fish "the most vicious child-slayer in criminal history."
At trial, he claimed insanity, with his attorney noting evidence of mental illness that included Fish torturing himself by inserting needles in his groin—where some remained, rusting away—and soaking wads of cotton in alcohol and inserting them in his anus before he set them on fire. In the presence of his own children, Fish would spank himself with a nail-studded paddle while shouting, "I am Christ!" The pièce de résistance was Fish's confession to frequently eating salads that contained lumps of his own feces. Speaking against Fish's defense at trial was Menas Gregory, the former manager of Bellevue psychiatric hospital, where Fish was treated during 1930, who told the court that Fish was "abnormal but sane." Under cross-examination, Gregory put on a bizarre performance of his own, telling the court that such quirks as drinking one's own urine and eating one's own feces was regarded by psychiatrists as being "socially perfectly all right." In fact, he claimed Fish was "no different from millions of other people," some prominent and financially successful, who suffered from the "very same" paraphilas. Willing to be convinced by any flimsy argument and take a cannibal child-killer out of circulation, jurors convicted Fish of first-degree murder and kidnapping in one case, condemning him to death. Rumors persist that the many needles floating around in his nether regions caused Sing Sing Prison's electric chair to malfunction with its first jolt to Fish, though a second charge accomplished its lethal purpose.
One final case, in which the insanity defense worked after a fashion, is that of Edward Theodore Gein, the "Mad Butcher" of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Few Americans remember Gein by name today, although he is memorialized in fiction as Norman Bates in the Psycho novels and films, as "Leatherface" in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film series, and as Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs. The confessed slayer of two middle-aged women, suspected of killing his older brother, a pair of hunters, and various younger females, Gein enjoyed an obsessive love-hate relationship with his domineering mother and veered into madness with her death in December 1945, when he was thirty-nine years old.
Preoccupied with sex-change surgery, although financially and geographically beyond the reach of medical aid, Gein began robbing graves and stealing parts of women's bodies he converted into decorations for his home and "clothing" that he wore around the house. Clad in skinned-out faces, scalps, torsos and genitalia, he would walk around the house and sometimes dance outside, beneath the moon. In time, he switched to living victims and was captured in November 1957, by a group of officers including his last victim's son. At his rural home, devoid of running water and electricity, police found the latest victim's gutted corpse, the head and other parts of another woman slain three years earlier, and a long list of bizarre relics including a wastebasket and lampshades made of human skin; a belt stitched together from nipples; skulls mounted on bedposts and converted into soup bowls; nine vulvae in a shoebox; four severed noses; women's fingernails; and a pair of lips dangling on a window shade's drawstring.
In custody, Gein admitted two murders but disclaimed any knowledge of others in which he was suspected. This time, the court did take his psychiatric state into account, finding Gein mentally unfit for trial in November 1957 and committing him to Wisconsin's Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (now the Dodge Correctional Institution). Eleven years later, doctors deemed Gein "mentally able to confer with counsel and participate in his defense," whereupon he faced trial on one count of first-degree murder. Convicted on that charge, he underwent a second trial regarding sanity in 1957, and Judge Robert H. Gollmar returned him to the state hospital, where cancer claimed Gein's life in July 1984, at age seventy-seven. By all accounts, he was a model patient, causing no trouble for staff or his fe
llow inmates.
Even before John Hinckley's attempted murder of President Reagan, jurors struggled with the insanity defense. Depending on the laws within a given state, commitment to a mental institution may be seen as an escape from rightful punishment, sometimes granting a killer's freedom long before he or she would normally be released from prison. Where psychiatrists—widely mistrusted in their own right by some laymen—hold the key to a violent offender's freedom or continued incarceration, many jurors choose to err on the side of caution, find the defendant "sane," and pass judgment accordingly. In fact, my own survey of American serial murder cases in the 20th century reveals that fewer than 2 percent of arrested defendants have been successful in mounting insanity pleas at their trials. Even then, only the most extreme cases, such as Ed Gein's, make the cut, while others equally as bad—Richard Chase and Herbert Mullin being two examples—are treated as "sane."
Whether mad or simply bad, serial killers fall into three broad categories, as defined by FBI profilers. The original classes were labeled organized and disorganized, but overlapping traits soon appeared in so many cases that Bureau taxonomists created a third mixed category. Earle Nelson, when examined, falls into the latter group, displaying qualities of both an organized and a disorganized slayer.
According to the FBI, organized killers typically display good intelligence, are socially and sexually competent, rank high in their family's birth order status, prefer skilled occupations, possess a controlled mood during their crimes (but drink alcohol in conjunction with murder), live with a partner, value mobility and keep a car in good condition, follow the investigation of their murders in the media, and may change jobs or leave town if the heat grows too intense. Organized killers plan their crimes against targeted strangers, brutalize said victims prior to death, often hide corpses while removing weapons and other evidence from the crime scene, and frequently transport bodies to a different dump site.
Disorganized offenders, by contrast, are said to be those of low birth order, with average or lower intelligence, have a poor work history, are sexually incompetent, display minimal use of alcohol, live alone, reside or work near their crime scenes, show little interest in news of their crimes, and rarely relocate to avoid capture. Their crimes are spontaneous, involving a known location or victim, with sloppy crime scenes, victims left where they were slain, and often displaying postmortem sexual assaults.
From those lists, we easily see the "mixed" nature of Nelson's behavior. He was an only child but never sought skilled work or had much luck at holding any job. He admittedly drank to excess from early adolescence onward, and while seen to drive a car occasionally, preferred to cover long distances by hitchhiking or hopping freight trains. He left town after town in order to evade arrest, but did not kill impulsively near any home he occupied long-term. His victims were targeted strangers, and he did hide certain corpses, but he did so at the murder scenes. He brought no weapons to his crimes, strangling women with his bare hands or with objects found in their homes, and made no effort to remove critical evidence. His crimes appeared to be spontaneous, triggered by the sighting of a "Room For Rent" sign, but Earle scoured each city in turn with the specific goal of killing landladies. His crimes were front-page news after a while, but if he took an interest in the stories beyond packing up and leaving town, no evidence of it exists today. Any attacks he made on victims prior to killing them were meant to bring them under his control. Despite his history with prostitutes from adolescence, it appears that Earle only indulged in necrophilia after he launched his murder spree.
What have we learned about serial killers since Earle Nelson's day? The answer seems to be another mixed bag. We know much about what makes them "tick," although each slayer is an individual in his or her own right. We understand, at least in broad strokes, how the monsters in our midst are shaped from childhood onward into relentless killing machines. We have forensic tools at our disposal to facilitate their apprehension—yet, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, some 20 percent of known serial murder cases, roughly one in five—remains unsolved despite the best efforts of law enforcement.
What we do not know is how to stop new generations of vicious men—and, increasingly, women—from joining the ranks of their predecessors. Increasing numbers of female and nonwhite serial killers in the United States leave questions surrounding the survey published in 1985, and late crime author Ann Rule's assertion from that same era that "serial killers are always male," while never true in fact, now stands revealed as completely fallacious. Unsolved cases persist, with killers sadly aided in some instances by the same outdated police attitudes and rivalries that allowed L.A.'s "Grim Sleeper" to remain at large for more than two decades.
Worldwide, the plague has spread. Europe always acknowledged its serial slayers, from Gilles de Rais in the 15th century and Countess Erzsébet Báthory in the 16th, to Joseph Vacher in the 19th, "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe in the 1970s, Fred and Rose West in the 1980s, and London's "Bus Stop Stalker," Levi Bellfield, during 2003 and 2004. More surprising, perhaps, is the spread of serial murder—or, at least, enhanced reporting of such crimes—into nations of the so-called "Third World" and former Communist Bloc. Throughout the 20th century, some 85 percent of all known serial killers were active in the United States, but modern media reports bring news from such countries as—
Russia: Once "immune" to serial murder, simply because Soviet leaders denied that such "decadent Western crimes" ever occurred within a "socialist paradise," today Russia claims such modern monsters as "Academy Maniacs" Artyom Alexandrovich Anoufriev and Nikita Vakhtangovich Lytkin, "Belinsky Cannibal" Alexander Bychkov, "Satan in a Skirt" Irina Gaidamachuk, "Dr. Death" Maxim Petrov, and Sergey "The Fisher" Golovkin.
The People's Republic of China: Similarly forced by ideology to deny the existence of serial killers until recent years, China now headlines such slayers as Li Wenxian (13 prostitutes killed), Huang Yong (17 teenage boys), Wang Qiang (45 murders and 10 rapes), and Yang Xinhai (67 murders and 23 rapes).
Latin America: Largely ignored by American researchers until the latter 1980s, now boasts epic killers including "Vampire of Niterói" Marcelo Costa de Andrade and "Pedrinho Matador" Pedro Rodrigues Filho (both in Brazil); "Viña del Mar Psychopaths" Jorge Sagredo and Carlos Topp (in Chile); "Monster of the Cane Fields" Manuel Octavio Bermúdez and Daniel Camargo Barbosa, "The Sadist of El Charquito" (in Colombia); "Monster of the Andes" Pedro Lopez (roaming across Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru); and "Old Lady Killer" Juana Barraza (Mexico).
India: Plagued by stranglers from the Thugee cult until British colonial forces crushed the sect in 1840, the Asian subcontinent now produces ruthless serial killers including Kampatimar Shankariya (70 confessed murders), Mohan Kumar (slayer of 20 women with cyanide), Umesh Reddy (18 killings confessed), Surinder Koli (19 children), Auto Shankar (9 teenage girls), and Tanielianand Darbara Singh (2 murders confessed, with 17 more suspected).
The Middle East: War-torn since 1948, this troubled region spawns serial killers as well as religious fanatic terrorists. Prominent examples include Dr. Louay Omar Mohammed al-Taei (43 victims in Iraq); "Tehran Desert Vampire" Mohammed Bijeh and Saeed Hanaei (both Iran); Nicolai Bonner (Israel); Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour (Egypt); brothers George and Michel (Lebanon); Bilal Musa and wife Susan Ibrahim (Jordan); and "Sana'a Ripper" Mohammed Adam Omar (Yemen),
South Africa: A surprise entry to the lists since the fall of apartheid, Africa's former bastion of militant white supremacy now claims such prolific murderers as "Wemmer Pan Killer" Maoupa Cedric Maake (27 victims), "Jesus Killer" Jimmy Maketta (16 killings and 19 rapes), "ABC Killer" Moses Sithole (38 killed), "Phoenix Strangler" Sipho Thwala (19 victims), "Pangaman" Elias Xitavhudzi (16 dead), and "Station Strangler" Norman Avzal Simons (22 slain).
Is the plague of random murder inescapable today, or are we simply inundated with sensational reporting from a host of countries previously overlooked by spokesmen for the Western media wher
e murder was concerned? In either case, the human monsters do exist, a clear and present danger to us all.
This illustration depicts the travels and killings of Earle Nelson across the USA and into Winnipeg, Canada 1926-1927. (Image: Portland Morning Oregonian)
List of confirmed and suspected victims by Nelson:
Olla McCoy - Philadelphia 10/18/25
May Murray - Philadelphia 11/06/25
Lillian Weiner - Philadelphia 11/09/25
Clara Newman - San Francisco 02/20/26
Laura E. Beal – San Jose 03/02/26
Lillian St. Mary – San Francisco 06/10/26
George Russell – Santa Barbara 06/24/26
Mary Nesbit – Oakland 08/16/26
Beata Withers – Portland 10/19/26
Mabel Fluke – Portland 10/20/26
Virginia Grant – Portland 10/21/26
Mrs. William Edmonds – San Francisco 11/18/26
Florence Monks – Seattle 11/23/26
Blanche Meyers – Portland 11/29/26
Mrs. John Berard – Iowa 12/23/26
Bonnie Pace – Kansas City 12/27/26
Germanla Harpin – Kansas City 12/28/26
Germanla Harpin's daughter – Kansas City 12/28/26
Mary McConnell – Philadelphia – 04/27/27
Jennie Randolph – Buffalo – 05/30/27
Minnie May – Detroit – 06/01/27
Maureen Atorthy – Detroit 06/01/27
Mary Sietsma – Chicago 06/03/27
The Dark Strangler: Serial Killer Earle Leonard Nelson (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked the Nation Book 9) Page 7