Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Back then, I still did not have the term “serial killer” to comfort me with its neat descriptors of what it was I had bumped into in that hotel lobby. The murder appeared to me as supernaturally monstrous as stories in the Tales from the Crypt comic books I had read as a kid. I might as well have encountered Dracula, the Werewolf, Frankenstein’s monster or some other movie ghoul.

  In a world where serial killers had not yet been definitively named, categorized and described, I was left with a sensation of having encountered a monster, in the ancient sense of the original Latin word, “monstrum”: “an omen or warning of the will of the gods.”4

  That encounter would forever shape how I would later write about serial killers. In futile attempts to somehow humanize serial killers or “secularize” their monstrous attributes, much of the current literature on serial killers disavows the monster construct. But I found myself starting from the opposite pole. I experienced a monstrum, one not so much bearing omens of the will of the gods, but of us, of ourselves, of our society. I came to see them as monstrous, misshapen reflections in a distorted mirror to human civilization.

  My brief personal close encounter with a monster inspired my pursuit to understand the phenomenon of serial murder and its social and forensic history. Where and how did these monsters first appear? Where did they come from, and why was there such a dramatic increase in their numbers in the last decades of the twentieth century, to the point that I randomly crossed paths with one of them, and then, later, another, and then a third? Were there just so many of them from the 1970s through to the 1990s that I would randomly encounter three different serial killers—in New York, Moscow and Toronto—all by chance and all before they had been identified as serial killers? For a long time, I thought these three encounters were freakishly unusual, but as we shall see, they were not actually all that unusual.

  The only thing that distinguishes me from you, or others who have unknowingly and randomly brushed by serial killers, is that in my case I later became aware of who my serial killers had been. Most people never find out, fortunately.

  Although Cottingham never attained the level of fame that other serial killers did, he fascinated many insiders in the field of serial homicide. The renowned profiler Dr. Robert Keppel, who dealt with super serial killers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” considers Cottingham the Mount Everest of sadistic serial killers. Keppel wrote, “Years after Cottingham had been put away, as I tried to figure out what could drive the sexually sadistic serial killer subtype, I kept asking myself what it was that ultimately intrigued me about the Cottingham cases. Partly it was the level of sadistic torture that Cottingham acted out on his victims. He didn’t kill them and desecrate their bodies; he forced them to experience pain and humiliation before he killed them. Then he desecrated their bodies.”5

  What strikes me most about my brief encounter with this serial killer was how entirely normal and forgettable he was. Cottingham did not look “evil” or monstrous. There was nothing menacing about him. He did not have fangs, red eyes, foul steaming breath or yellowed claws. He was not screwy looking or twitchy. He wasn’t babbling crazily or splattered in blood (even though he had just sawn off the heads of two victims), nor did he have a Hannibal Lecter aristocratic charm and bearing. At worst, he looked a little stoned and blank eyed, which I guess is what satiated bloodlust looks like.

  He was so ordinary that by the time I got off the elevator on his floor I had already forgotten him, and I did not think of him again until I saw his picture in a newspaper.

  * * *

  • • •

  After Cottingham was caught, I sought to better understand what he was. The first true-crime book about serial murder that I read was The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule’s seminal 1980 account of the iconic serial killer Ted Bundy, but the term “serial killer” did not appear in the pages of her definitive book when I read it.

  Before the 1980s, movies had been made, articles and books had been written, about serial killers like Jack the Ripper, H. H. Holmes, Albert Fish, Ed Gein, the Boston Strangler, the Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, and the Hillside Strangler(s), but except for cops among themselves occasionally, nobody called any of them “serial killers” or, more importantly, classified them as a specific and unique species of murderer. Each one was a self-contained case.

  Canadian social anthropologist Elliott Leyton’s 1986 book, Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer (first published in the US as Compulsive Killers: The Story of Modern Multiple Murder), was probably the first popular book to comprehensively describe the phenomenon of serial killers and their social history. While the term “serial killer” appears in the pages of his book, it was still not a term familiar enough to the public for the publisher to use in the book title.6

  The pendulum of writing about serial killers swings between monstrosity and psychology, between mythology and history, between the monstrous-supernatural and the forensic-scientific. Serial killers, I finally realized, are what we decide they are, and that definition constantly changes with history and society. But for centuries before the 1980s, we had no idea of what they were or how to describe them, other than as “monsters.”

  COINING THE TERM “SERIAL KILLER”

  Before we could recognize what serial killing was, we needed a term for it. Throughout most of its modern history, serial killing had been given a host of different labels, like “stranger-on-stranger murder,” “recreational killing,” “pattern murder,” “thrill killing,” “multicide,” “psycho murder,” “sequential homicide,” “compulsive murder,” “multiple murder,” “motiveless killing,” “lust murder,” “spree killing” and, confusingly, “mass murder,” which today we define as a single rampage of multiple murders. Nobody agreed on a single term for serial killing or what defined it, nor did anybody assemble all those different multiple-killer profiles and their characteristics into named constellations or categories.

  Today “serial killer” is as generic and as familiar a term as “Kleenex,” “Scotch tape” or, ominously, “dumpster.” But thirty-five years ago, our perception of serial killers was reminiscent of the first scenes of a zombie movie, the ones where everybody is running around at the early stage of a zombie apocalypse, trying to figure out what is overrunning civilization. Is it an epidemic disease? A weaponized toxin? A genetic mutation? A pathological rabid cannibal rage? Is it an alien virus? Is it something supernatural? And why is this zombie plague spreading?

  By 1979, when I had my first encounter, we were already well into what would later be called the “serial killer epidemic,” and it was only going to get worse, with an unprecedented surge of serial murder in the United States and around the world, but we still had not named what this thing was. Having read The Stranger Beside Me, I understood that Cottingham was something like Ted Bundy, something like Jack the Ripper, something like the Boston Strangler, something like John Wayne Gacy, something like all the recently reported “multiple pattern thrill killers” from the 1960s and 1970s like Edmund Kemper, Jerry Brudos, Juan Corona, the Hillside Strangler(s), Dean Corll, the Son of Sam, and the unidentified Zodiac Killer. Yet there seemed to be more differences between each killer than similarities. Some targeted only female prostitutes, some only gay men, some only children, some only college-aged women. Some mutilated their victims; some did not. Some killed only with their hands, others with rope, or stockings, or knives, or guns. Some were stationary, killing in one specific place; others were migratory, traveling thousands of miles in their search for victims. Some left bodies by the side of the road, while others kept them buried in secret backwoods “cemeteries” of their own. They all did the same thing in essence—they killed multiple victims—but each one seemed to do it in his own particular way or pattern. Thus the early use of the term “pattern killers” to describe them.

  The popular notion of serial killers came from movies like Psycho, Frenzy, Dir
ty Harry, 10 Rillington Place, Eyes of Laura Mars, Deranged, Maniac and Terror Train, many of which were inspired by actual cases. Serial killers were largely perceived as simply madmen, or inexplicable monsters like the supernaturally invincible Jason of the Friday the 13th movies or Michael Myers from Halloween. In fact, the first Halloween and Friday the 13th movies came out, respectively, in 1978 and 1980, before the term “serial killer” was introduced into the mainstream.

  There was no single word that everybody agreed named what these predatory monsters were or how they functioned. And without “the Word” we had no idea of “the Thing.” While law enforcement had an awareness of the growing phenomenon, the rest of us in the general public and the media were blind to it.

  It was only in May 1981 that the serial-killer and serial-murder constructs first began appearing in the mass media. Regarding Wayne Williams, suspected in the murders of thirty-one children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, the New York Times wrote:

  The incident underscored the belief of many law-enforcement officials and forensic scientists in Atlanta that only some of the killings are the result of a “serial” or “pattern” murderer. . . . 7

  If the New York Times is America’s national “paper of record,” then Wayne Williams is our first “serial killer of record.” There is no single story as to who coined the term “serial killer,” and it is entirely plausible that several people independently proposed the term. According to the late true-crime author Ann Rule, California detective Pierce Brooks first coined it.8 True-crime author Michael Newton points out that the term is used by author John Brophy in his 1966 book The Meaning of Murder.9 Author Harold Schechter and criminal-deviance scholar Lee Mellor discovered that Ernst August Ferdinand Gennat, the chief of the Berlin police, used the term “serienmörder” (serial murder) in the 1930s to describe the crimes of Peter Kürten.10

  The earliest English-language use of the term “serial killings” I’ve found in print was by the biblical scholar, historian and concentration-camp survivor Robert Eisler, in his annotations to a lecture he gave on sadism and anthropology to the Royal Society of Medicine in London in 1948. The lecture was published posthumously in 1951 as a heavily footnoted book entitled Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. In describing innate infantile sadism, Eisler wrote:

  The serial killings in the “Punch and Judy” plays for children are so enjoyable because the puppets are of wood and the beaten skulls sound so wooden and insensitive. Nevertheless this enjoyment is certainly the harmless “abreaction” of the cruel urges of infancy.11*

  While perhaps various people proposed it, I personally believe the most plausible coiner of the term “serial killer” as we are familiar with it today is FBI agent and behavior-sciences profiler Robert K. Ressler. In his memoirs, Ressler writes that he felt the popular term for serial murder, “stranger killings,” was inappropriate because not all victims of serial killers were strangers. Ressler was lecturing at a police academy in England in 1974 when he heard the description of some crimes as occurring in “a series”—a series of rapes, arsons, burglaries or murders.

  Ressler said that the description reminded him of the movie industry term for short episodic films shown on Saturday afternoons during the 1930s and 1940s: “serial adventures.” Audiences were lured back to movie theaters week after week by the inconclusive ending of each episode—the so-called cliff-hanger. Instead of providing a satisfying conclusion, these endings increased the tension in the audience. Likewise, Ressler felt, after every murder serial killers experience a “cliff-hanging” tension and a desire to commit a more perfect murder than before, one that is closer to their fantasy. Rather than being satisfied when they murder, serial killers are compelled to repeat their killing in a cycle, a pattern of serial-movie-like “cliff-hanger” murders. “Serial killing,” Ressler argued, was a very appropriate term for the compulsive multiple homicides that he believed he was dealing with.12

  CATEGORIZING SERIAL KILLERS

  As Ressler was struggling with what to call them, he, his colleague John E. Douglas at the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) (today called Behavioral Analysis Unit [BAU]) and forensic nurse Ann W. Burgess were interviewing twenty-nine incarcerated sexual serial killers and seven solo sexual murderers, asking them about their childhoods, their fantasies and what they thought they were doing. Conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these interviews would later spawn the FBI’s controversial profiling system of organized/disorganized/mixed classifications of serial killers:

  Organized serial killers carefully plan their crimes, patiently stalk their victims, often use charm and guile to abduct them or gain control over them, come prepared with weapons and restraints and attempt to clean up the crime scene to destroy forensic evidence. They tend to encounter and abduct their victims at one location, kill them at another and dispose of their bodies at yet a third location, making it very difficult for investigators to piece together a timeline. They are smart, social, physically attractive, married or in relationships, gainfully employed, dress well, have neat apartments, drive well-maintained and clean cars, etc.;

  Disorganized serial killers do not plan their murders, and they often act on a whim, spontaneously using sudden brute force (blitz) to abduct and subdue their victims. They lack the social skills to charm their victims and are often loners or drifters and are unemployed. They use improvised weapons found at the scene to kill their victims, often abandon the victims’ bodies where they first encountered and killed them and leave behind messy crime scenes with lots of evidence. They live in messy apartments, are often physically repulsive and drive decrepit, poorly maintained cars, etc.

  Unfortunately for the FBI system, very few serial killers fall neatly into one or the other category. Most serial killers exhibit a mix of characteristics from both categories, and thus the FBI introduced a third category, mixed, a rather meaningless combination of the first two categories.

  Despite the flaws in the organized/disorganized/mixed system, it was a breakthrough, the first attempt to classify individual serial killers into categories or species with specific characteristics in a way that aided investigators in the field. The focus of the FBI research was not so much to unravel the mystery of a serial killer’s psychology but to understand how the nature of a crime scene could contribute to identifying the perpetrator, or in FBI-speak, the “unsub”—unknown subject. As John Douglas famously stated, “If you want to understand the artist, look at his work.”

  The results of these interviews with incarcerated offenders were published in a 1988 textbook, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, one of the first scientific-academic book-length studies focused almost entirely on sexual serial killers, their fantasies, childhoods, characteristics and behaviors, and a rudimentary guide to profiling them.13 Its three authors, Ressler, Douglas and Burgess, are among the American pioneers in serial-offender profiling and crime-scene psychological analysis, along with earlier pioneers like Walter C. Langer, who profiled Adolf Hitler for US intelligence in the 1940s; LAPD psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River in the 1940s; New York psychiatrist James Brussel, who famously profiled serial bomber George Metesky in the 1950s and the Boston Strangler in the 1960s; and later, LAPD homicide detective Pierce Brooks, FBI agents Howard Teten and Roy Hazelwood, Michigan forensic psychologist Richard Walter and Washington State attorney general’s investigator Robert Keppel.

  With the publication of Sexual Homicide in 1988, we now had a fuller understanding of the term “serial killer” and a much more specific, albeit rudimentary, road map to what it entailed. Three years later the film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs widely popularized the serial killer and FBI profiler as high-concept adversaries.

  THE SERIAL KILLER SURGE IN THE 1970S–1980S

  If you are over the age of fifty, as I am, you will remember a more innocent world without the specter
of serial killers, a world that at first appeared safe and innocent but transformed into a place overrun by zombielike serial-killing human monsters.

  Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver were more than just clichéd TV shows from the late 1950s and early 1960s; there was a palpably real naïveté in that era, especially if you were a kid. In those days few imagined a world where the dad in Leave It to Beaver might be burying bodies in the basement or sodomizing the Beaver while Mom might be posing in explicit classified ads to lure victims to their home, or that big brother Wally might be torturing the family cat while masturbating to men’s adventure magazines or peeping through the neighbor’s window with a knife in hand.

  In the innocent 1950s, milk came in clear glass bottles delivered to the door by milkmen in pristine white uniforms, not sold in waxed paper cartons printed with the faces of missing children. People really did leave their doors unlocked and windows thrown open in the 1950s and early 1960s.

  But everything changed by the end of the 1960s. The virulence of the rising rate of serial killing in that epoch is astounding.

  According to the Radford University/FGCU (Florida Gulf Coast University) Serial Killer Database, out of 2,236 serial killers on record in the United States between 1900 and 2000, 82 percent (1,840) made their appearance between 1970 and 2000;14

  Another study of 431 serial-killer cases in the United States between 1800 and 2004 found that 65 percent (234 cases) occurred between 1970 and 2004;15