In the twenty-five-year period of 1970 to 1995, there was a tenfold increase in active serial killers compared to the 169 years between 1800 and 1969.16
This last thirty-year surge in serial killers exponentially outpaced the growth of the general population in the United States. It felt so much like a plague by the 1980s that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta began to look into the phenomenon of serial murder and Congress held hearings on the issue.17 (see chapter thirteen for more on the “serial-killer epidemic.”)
Just consider the frequency of the term “serial killer” in the New York Times. In the decade after its first use, in 1981, the term “serial killer” appeared 253 times in the paper; in the 10 years after that, in the 1990s, it appeared 2,514 times.18
By the 1990s, serial killing had become a major source of obsessive entertainment, not only for the few killers perpetrating it, but for millions of consumers watching it in the movies and on TV and reading about it. There were serial-killer trading cards, calendars and fan clubs and collectors of serial-killer “murderabilia.” By the 1990s, serial killers were entrenched in American popular culture, taking their place with dinosaurs, cowboys, baseball and zombies.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND WITH SERIAL KILLERS
Seven years after my brief encounter with Cottingham in New York, I went to work for CNN. In its early Ted Turner start-up days, CNN had hired many of its staff and technicians from the newsrooms of local television stations in Atlanta, where Turner Broadcasting was based. Almost everybody I worked with had a story to tell of their close encounters with the Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams, who had sought work as a freelance cameraman for local TV news. Hearing these stories, I felt less lonely in my brief encounter with Cottingham in 1979.
Then in October 1990 I randomly encountered my second serial killer.
While shooting a documentary in Moscow in a tent city full of protestors, I was approached for an interview by the notorious serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, aka “the Red Ripper” or “Citizen X.” This was a few weeks before he returned to his hometown in the Ukraine to kill his fifty-third victim and was arrested. For years he had been killing, mutilating and sometimes cannibalizing women, teenagers and small children of both sexes, and when he was caught his fifty-three victims propelled him to the top of the list of the most prolific serial killers of all time. (Currently he stands at number six.19)
Unlike my awkward, wordless encounter with the more obscure Cottingham eleven years earlier, this encounter involved a conversation lasting several minutes (I speak Russian) in which Chikatilo attempted to persuade me to film an interview with him. It was not murder that Chikatilo wanted to talk about but some absurd story about how organized criminals in his hometown were building public toilets near his apartment house and how he had come to Moscow to personally lodge a complaint with the Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev.
I thought his story was dumb (especially compared with the grievances of other Russians in that tent city), and not wanting to waste any of our precious videotape to record him, I turned him away. (In 1990, broadcast-camera videotape was very expensive and difficult to find in Russia.) As with Cottingham, I found out only much later whom I’d encountered, my second monster in the wild. My random encounters with two serial killers, my two serial killers, were looking like weird math. Serial killers are rare. And while anything can happen once, like a lightning strike, to randomly encounter serial killers twice was odd. But at the same time, it made me think there might be others I have encountered without realizing it; maybe there were three—or even more—and this notion eventually inspired me to write my first book about them, in 2004.
And indeed, by virtue of the FBI redefinition of serial killing in 2005 from at least three victims to two victims, I realized that I had actually encountered three serial killers in my life. I met my third in the early 1980s as he was about to become a serial killer, between his first and second murders.
I was working undercover within the Ku Klux Klan on a documentary shoot. Gary “Mick” MacFarlane was a security officer for the local den of the KKK and had already murdered one victim. At trial he had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. He sat out a stretch in a psychiatric facility and was released a few years later after psychiatrists determined him cured. MacFarlane found a job as a security company dog handler and joined the KKK. A few years after I met him, I read in the papers that he had murdered a second victim. In the 1980s, that did not make him a serial killer, but once the FBI downgraded the definition of a serial killer from three to two victims, he retroactively became my third serial killer. I thought, how crazy is that, to have encountered three serial killers without having sought them out?
I should not have been all that impressed by my multiple “close encounters” with serial killers. By the time I met the first of my serial killers in 1979, a US president’s wife had met her serial killer, when John Wayne Gacy as the director of Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day Parade hosted President Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, in May 1978. The White House released an official photo of the first lady posing with Gacy.20 Six months later, to the embarrassment of the White House, police would find twenty-six corpses rotting in the crawl space of Gacy’s home and several more buried elsewhere.
At about the same time, Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, was meeting his serial killer, the teenaged Jeffrey Dahmer, who arranged a spontaneous visit for himself and some classmates with the vice president as a prank during a high school trip to Washington, D.C. (having failed in his attempt to secure a visit with President Carter).21
And in 1977 the governor of California Jerry Brown was not only encountering his serial killer but was dancing with and hugging her. Dorothea Puente, the “Death House Landlady” who buried some of her nine elderly victims in the rose garden of her Sacramento, California, boardinghouse, bought tables at political fund-raising events, at one of which she met and danced with the governor.22
If there were serial killers visiting television newsrooms, escorting first ladies, touring the White House and dancing with governors, then my own little encounters were beginning to look pretty lame. Everybody seemed to be running into serial killers.
Rodney Alcala, who would be convicted for the murders of seven women and suspected in as many as 130 murders, is alleged to have taken filmmaking lessons in 1970 from Roman Polanski, who the previous year just barely missed an encounter of his own with Charlie Manson’s cult killers (arguably a species of serial killers) when they killed his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate.23 (Actor Steve McQueen and author Jerzy Kosinski were also invited to the house on the night of the murders but did not go.)
Serial killers were even making appearances on TV. The same Rodney Alcala appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game in 1978 (and won), while serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards, who murdered at least five victims, appeared on two game shows, To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line?, even though he was a convicted felon.24 (More recently, the British necrophile serial killer Stephen Port, the “Grindr Killer,” appeared on Celebrity MasterChef UK, making meatballs, while at the time he was killing and then raping at least four male victims.)25
By now serial killers were even randomly crossing paths with other serial killers. The Chicago satanic-cult serial killer Robin Gecht, later linked to the gang rape/mutilation/cannibal murders of seventeen female victims, was employed as a laborer by John Gacy, neither aware of the other’s serial killing.
Adolph James “Jimmy” Rode, aka Cesar Barone, claimed he was personally “tutored” by Ted Bundy when he was briefly jailed with him in Florida. Barone was assigned work distributing food trays and would later tell people that Bundy had whispered to him how easy it is to kill women and hide the evidence.26 Barone later raped and murdered four women.
And then there was the ultimate! A case of one serial killer murdering another serial killer, when Wayne Henley
shot Dean Corll (the “Candy Man”) in 1973, after the two of them had together tortured, raped and murdered twenty-eight male teenagers in Houston, Texas. Corll threatened to make Henley his twenty-ninth victim; Henley struck first and Dextered Corll.
It really did seem like a zombie plague with serial killers now infectiously biting out new serial killers and even turning on one another.
By the 1990s, everybody was familiar with the term “serial killer” and many people had encountered one for themselves, however randomly or briefly. Along with Polanski, other celebrities reportedly encountered serial killers. Sean Penn, serving sixty days in Los Angeles County Jail for reckless driving in 1987, exchanged notes with Richard Ramirez, “the Nightstalker.”27 Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry was picked up by Ted Bundy in the early 1970s while hitchhiking and fled his car when she became suspicious of his behavior.28 Some celebrities even fell victim to serial killers. In 1978 Larry Flynt, the flamboyant publisher of Hustler magazine, was shot and paralyzed for life by Joseph Paul Franklin, a “missionary” species of serial killer, who had killed at least eight victims and perhaps as many as twenty-two, acting on racial hate and an obsession with interracial couples. (Flynt’s magazine had depicted interracial sex.) The Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace was murdered on the front steps of his home in Miami Beach by spree serial killer Andrew Cunanan in 1997. In 2001, actor Ashton Kutcher discovered the body of his girlfriend, murdered by alleged serial killer “the Hollywood Ripper,” who is awaiting trial for three murders committed between 1993 and 2005 and is suspected in another seven.29 Air force colonel and serial killer Russell Williams piloted the Canadian equivalent of Air Force One, and flew not just the prime minister but other dignitaries, including Queen Elizabeth—all while videotaping the rape-murders of two women, including an air force corporal under his command, and perpetrating hundreds of fetish burglaries of women’s underwear.30
Since Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters was published, I have received dozens of letters in which people recount stories of serial killers they were picked up by while hitchhiking, or knew in school or at work, lived next door to, et cetera. Most of the stories are plausible and often check out against timelines and locations. If they were lucky, people’s encounters were harmless. A few even had positive stories to tell, including one from an ex–Marine scout sniper who had a sexual encounter with gay serial killer Randy Kraft, the “Scorecard Killer” or “Freeway Killer,” in California. Kraft was convicted of drugging, sodomizing and murdering sixteen young men, some of them Marines, and suspected in sixty-seven other murders. In his letter to me the ex-Marine claimed that Kraft had given him direction in life and had “saved” him. In 2013 he published his story, writing, “He made me feel special in the most irresistible way. For one impossibly beautiful California afternoon, I was very much in love with him. And I’ve never had another man, before or since, affect me that way.”31
In a way it makes sense. We all routinely encounter dozens of people a day, and so do serial killers. Serial killers do not kill most of the people they encounter. So there are thousands of people who knowingly or unknowingly had personal encounters with these monsters. Only for the unlucky few it goes bad.
That number of the unlucky, however, grew dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s as corpses began piling up in abandoned lots, in bushes and woods, in secret cemeteries, by roadside ditches, in dumpsters, in culverts, floating in rivers and swamps, buried in gardens and basements or wrapped in plastic bags and stacked in attics or recorded on videotape or Polaroid photos squirreled away as death trophies. I began to wonder how many serial killers an average person might have stood in line behind at a McDonald’s, sat next to on a bus, parked a car near at a shopping mall or just passed by randomly on the street.
Even one of my readers turned out to be a notorious serial killer. Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer,” had my first book in his possession along with a book by a colleague, forensic psychology professor and author Katherine Ramsland, when he was identified and arrested.32 Pondering this “professional endorsement” shivers me out to this day.
By the 1990s, even if one hadn’t personally encountered any serial killers, everybody agreed on what they were: white males who killed for sexual reasons in at least three separate events with cooling-off periods in between. But by the 2010s, everything had changed. A profiler could no longer count on an “unsub” being a white male. Studies were showing that 50 to 60 percent of serial killers were now African-Americans33—except they rarely became front-page news. Offenders tend to kill within their own race, and serial killers often target prostitutes and marginalized victims, exactly the type of victim that garners less interest and attention in the media. The murder of eleven impoverished minority women by Anthony Sowell, “the Cleveland Strangler,” in 2007 and 2008 made the news only because he kept their bodies in his house despite complaints from neighbors about the smell of decaying flesh. Lonnie Franklin Jr., “the Grim Sleeper,” is suspected in hundreds of murders of marginalized women in California that went mostly overlooked and unreported for three decades, until he was finally convicted in 2016 for eleven serial killings. Lorenzo Gilyard, “the Kansas City Strangler,” was linked to the murders of thirteen women and convicted in six of the murders. Most of his victims had cloth or paper towels stuffed into their mouths, were raped and strangled and were missing their shoes. Despite the high body counts, the names of these African-American serial killers are less prominent than those of white serial killers like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy.
By the 2000s almost one in every six serial killers was a woman, 53 percent of whom killed at least one child or female victim, and since the 1980s, slightly more female serial killers preferred strangers as victims, challenging the “black widow” stereotype who kills her husbands or lovers only.34 Known as the “quiet killers,” women are often not even recognized as serial killers. Genene Jones, for example, a Texas nurse suspected in the murders of sixty infants in her care, was prosecuted for the murders of only two infants and received a sentence that made her eligible for release in 2017. In a desperate bid to prevent her mandatory release in May 2017, authorities charged her for additional murders going back to 1977–1982. Female serial killers are also known to team up with male serial-killing lovers, like Karla Homolka in Canada, who partnered with her husband, Paul Bernardo, in the rape-murders of three teenage girls, including her younger sister; and Charlene Adell (Williams) Gallego, who partnered with her husband, Gerald, in the rape-torture murders of ten victims. Interestingly, after their arrests and testimony against their husbands, both women received relatively light sentences; they now live in freedom. (I describe all three cases in detail in Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters [2007]. See also Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers [2016] for an account of Karla Homolka’s postprison life.)
No sooner did we think we knew what serial killers were than we had to rethink it all.
REDEFINING SERIAL KILLERS
There have been many proposed definitions of serial killing, including:
When someone murders at least three persons in more than a thirty-day period (R. Holmes and S. Holmes);35
At least two fantasy-driven compulsive murders committed at different times and at different locations where there is no relationship between the perpetrator and victim and no material gain, with victims having characteristics in common (Steven A. Egger);36
When an individual, acting alone or with another, commits two or more separate homicides over a period of time, with breaks between each murder event (Vernon Geberth);37
Premeditated murder of three or more victims committed over time, in separate incidents, in a civilian context, with the murder activity being chosen by the offender (B. T. Keeney and K. Heide);38
When someone commits at least ten homicides over time. The homicides are violent and brutal, but they are
also ritualistic—they take on their own meaning for the serial murderer (Helen Morrison);39
When someone murders two or more victims, with an emotional cooling-off period between the homicides (Deborah Schurman-Kauflin).40
Before 2005, the traditional definition of serial killing was the one the FBI first introduced in the 1980s: three victims on separate occasions with a “cooling-off” period in between. It is still often wrongly cited as the current definition. The FBI eventually realized the “three victims” definition presented all sorts of statistical and conceptual problems. It excluded murderers who have an obvious, identifiable serial-killer psychopathology but are apprehended after their first or second murder, before they can commit the requisite third. It did not account for serial offenders against whom only two convictions were made, thus excluding on a technicality some notorious historic serial killers, like Albert Fish, Ed Gein, Albert DeSalvo and Wayne Williams, who were all convicted for only one or two homicides, notwithstanding persuasive suspicions of many more victims. Most accounts of serial-killer convictions typically include an additional number of “suspected in” murders. Once a serial killer is convicted in one jurisdiction, often other jurisdictions do not bother taking the costly effort to extradite him and put him on trial.
Experts also argued over whether serial killers are defined by the compulsive sexual-fantasy components inherent in their crimes. We debated whether the perpetrators were always male. Were the victims always strangers, and if so, should hit men, gangbangers, genocidal war criminals and terrorists be considered serial killers, since they are killing strangers in separate incidents interspersed by cooling-off periods? Or does a serial killer need to choose his or her own victim, and what constitutes choice? Is serial killing a secondary symptom of behavioral disorders such as psychopathy or sociopathy, or is it an addictive paraphilia (sexual perversion) of its own called erotophonophilia? (More on paraphilias and erotophonophilia below.) Many of these debates are still ongoing in conferences and in the pages of forensic academic literature.
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