Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Midy began to scream and struggle, bit him and managed to break free. Luckily for her a neighbor heard the commotion and came to the door. Philippe calmly brushed by the neighbor, saying, “Madame Midy has suddenly taken ill; I am going for the doctor; I don’t think it is serious.” He managed to get as far as the street before neighbors caught up to him and restrained him. A long knife was found in his possession and a police search of his apartment turned up several bloodstained items belonging to some of the victims, including Marie Bodeux.

  Louis-Joseph Philippe had been born in 1831 in Velleminfroy, in eastern France near the Swiss border. He served in the French army but apparently was punished and dismissed for drunken misbehavior. After his discharge he made his way to Paris. Witnesses would later testify that Philippe was a good worker but had a drinking problem. A waitress in a wine bar testified that he said to her, “I am very fond of women, and I accommodate them in my own way. I first strangle them, then I cut their throats. Wait a bit and you will hear me talked about.”48

  Philippe began killing shortly after his arrival in Paris and is believed to have committed eleven murders between 1861 and 1866. His killings were all characterized by his first strangling the victims and then cutting their throats so deeply that they were almost decapitated, a method very similar to that of Jack the Ripper later. Although they suspected him in ten murders, police could find evidence linking him to only four murders: Julie Robert, a twenty-six-year-old prostitute; Flore Mage, thirty-two years, and her four-year-old son; and Marie-Victorine Bodeux. Philippe was sentenced to death on June 28, 1866, and guillotined in July.

  Eusebius Pieydagnelle, “Blood Butcher”—France, 1870

  In 1870, in Vignevieille, France, Eusebius Pieydagnelle, a twenty-four-year-old former butcher’s apprentice and clerk, surrendered to authorities and confessed to killing six people. According to the evidence presented in court, Eusebius came from a “highly respectable family” and was well educated. He lived across the street from a butcher shop, and stated, “The smell of fresh blood, and appetizing meat, the bloody lumps—all this fascinated me and I began to envy the butcher’s assistant, because he could work at the block, with rolled-up sleeves and bloody hands.” Although his parents were opposed, Eusebius found employment with the butcher and was overjoyed at the opportunity to butcher animals all day long. He stated that he was obsessed with blood and would have an orgasm at the sight and smell of it.

  His father eventually took Eusebius away from the butcher shop and apprenticed him to a notary. This threw Eusebius into a deep depression and he began killing. His first victim was a fifteen-year-old girl into whose bedroom he crept as she slept. He described the murder:

  As I looked at the lovely creature my first thought was that I should like to kiss her. I bent down . . . but I paused—a stolen kiss is no use. But I could not bring myself to wake her up. I looked at her lovely neck and at that moment the gleam of the kitchen knife that lay beside the girl struck my eyes. Something drew me irresistibly toward the knife.

  He killed five or six more times, stating that he would orgasm whenever he stabbed his victims. His last victim, before he surrendered to police, was his former employer, the butcher.

  Vincenzo Verzeni, the “Vampire of Bergamo”—Italy, 1871

  In northern Italy, near Bergamo, in December 1870, a fourteen-year-old girl, Johanna Motta, set out to a neighboring village but failed to return. She was discovered lying by a path in the fields, with her abdomen cut open and her torn-out intestines and genitals flung near the crime scene. She had been suffocated with dirt forced into her mouth and appeared to be strangled. Nearby, under a pile of straw, were found remnants of her clothing and a piece of flesh cut from her calf.

  In August 1871, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, Elisabetta Pagnoncelli, was found by her husband in a field when she failed to return home. She had been strangled and her intestines were protruding through a deep wound in her abdomen. The next day, nineteen-year-old Maria Previtali reported that her cousin, twenty-two-year-old Vincenzo Verzeni, had dragged her out into a field of grain and attempted to strangle her. When he stood up to see if anyone was coming, she managed to talk him into letting her go. Verzeni was arrested and he confessed:

  I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating. I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims. I took the clothing and intestines, because of the pleasure it gave me to smell and touch them. At last my mother came to suspect me, because she noticed spots of semen on my shirt after each murder or attempt at one. I am not crazy, but in the moment of strangling my victims I saw nothing else. After the commission of the deeds I was satisfied and felt well. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals and such things. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed. During the strangling and after it, I pressed myself on the entire body without thinking of one part more than another.49

  Verzeni admitted that he experienced sexual pleasure whenever he choked a woman. Previously he had experienced orgasms while pressing his victims’ throats without killing them, but in the case of the two murder victims his sexual satisfaction took so long that they died. He sucked the blood of his victims and tore a piece of flesh from Motta’s calf to take home and roast, but hid it under a haystack for fear that his mother might suspect him. Verzeni stated that at age twelve he discovered that he derived sexual pleasure from wringing the necks of chickens. In the four years before the murders he attempted to strangle three other women, including his former nurse while she slept sick in bed.

  In the 1800s an influential school of Italian criminology led by Cesare Lombroso held that physical features revealed innate criminal character; therefore, close attention was paid to Verzeni’s physiognomy.

  The clinical assessment of Verzeni concluded:

  It seems probable that Verzeni had a bad ancestry—two uncles are cretins; a third, microcephalic, beardless and one testicle wanting, the other atrophic . . . Verzeni’s family is bigoted and low-minded. He himself has ordinary intelligence; knows how to defend himself well; seeks to prove an alibi and cast suspicion on others. There is nothing in his past that points to mental disease, but his character is peculiar. He is silent and inclined to be solitary. In prison he is cynical. He masturbates, and makes every effort to gain sight of women.

  The description of this nineteenth-century sexual serial killer is remarkably typical of the ones of today. Verzeni was of average intelligence and showed no signs of mental disease but was “peculiar and inclined to be solitary.” Vincenzo Verzeni was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1872 and died in prison in 1918.

  Carlino (Callisto) Grandi, the “Child Killer”—Italy, 1875

  Carlino (Callisto) Grandi was a twenty-six-year-old wheelwright and wagon repairer in Val d’Arno Incisa, a small village near Florence. Grandi was born with congenital alopecia (hairlessness), a head too large in proportion to his body, oversized feet and hands and six toes on one of his feet. He was judged to have no more intelligence than a seven-year-old. He was the “village idiot” and a target of bullying and taunts all his life. Nonetheless, Grandi was self-supporting, repairing wagons and wheels in a shop in the center of the small town.

  Village boys often came into his shop to taunt and bait him. Grandi apparently attempted to curry their favor, sometimes giving them little treats or wooden toys, but he failed to get the respect he desired. Over the next two years he murdered four village boys between the ages of four and nine, luring them one by one into his shop, where he had already dug graves in the soft earthen floor. He hit some over the head with a piece of heavy wagon wh
eel and strangled others into unconsciousness and buried them alive. There was no evidence that he sexually attacked them.

  On August 29, 1875, he was caught red-handed attempting to murder a nine-year-old boy. The corpses of the four missing boys were unearthed from shallow graves the same day and Grandi was arrested.

  Grandi confessed that he killed the children in revenge for the endless bullying he received over his various physical and mental disabilities. Italian forensic psychiatrists argued that he should be certified insane. The Italian media called for the formation of a national society for the prevention of cruelty toward the mentally and physically disabled, proclaiming that not only four-legged animals deserve dignity, but two-legged as well.50

  During his trial Grandi was often incoherently grandiose and paranoid, claiming to be eighty years old, a painter and a telegrapher. While in prison, despite his apparent learning disabilities, he composed theatrical comedies and novels based on his own case. The court rejected claims of insanity, and Grandi was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fortunately for him, Tuscany had abolished the death penalty in 1786. (The rest of Italy would follow in 1889. Except during the Fascist period under Mussolini, Italy has not had capital punishment since.) Italy’s forensic psychiatrists protested the decision to convict Grandi as a criminal, and the nature of criminal insanity became the subject of a lively debate. L’ammazzabambini—“the Childkiller”—was released after serving twenty years and was immediately confined to a psychiatric facility, where he died in 1911.51

  Juan Díaz de Garayo, “El Sacamantecas” (the “Fat Extractor”)—Spain, 1879

  Juan Díaz de Garayo committed six murders, mostly of prostitutes. Garayo was born on October 17, 1821, into a peasant family near Salvatierra in the Basque region of Spain. He worked as a farmhand, shepherd and coal miner, married a landholding widow in 1850 and had five children, two of whom died young, typical of that era. The marriage was apparently a happy one, but his wife died in 1863. Garayo’s second marriage was less happy, as there were conflicts between his wife and his children. She died from smallpox in 1870 and Garayo apparently committed his first murder shortly after that.

  On the afternoon of April 2, 1870, Garayo hired a prostitute in his town of Vitoria and took her outside the city gates where they had sex near a stream. The agreed price had been five Spanish reals but Garayo now offered the woman only three. When she protested, Garayo threw her to the ground and choked her until she lost consciousness. He then dragged her to the stream and submerged her face in water until she drowned. Garayo rolled the corpse on its back and stripped it nude, apparently contemplating and fondling the dead woman. Before leaving the scene, he covered her with her clothing. She was found the next morning by a servant picking flowers.

  In 1871 Garayo married his third wife, an alcoholic with whom he would have an even more tempestuous relationship than with his previous wife. He would be married to her for five years.

  On March 12, 1871, Garayo encountered a destitute woman begging on the street. He offered her five reals in exchange for sex. As she had not eaten that day, he advanced her one real to purchase some bread and a glass of wine, and she agreed to meet him later that day outside town. After they had sex, Garayo attempted to shortchange the woman (according to his own confession) and in the ensuing fracas he strangled her. The body was discovered the next day.

  On August 21, 1872, Garayo turned from prostitutes to the next “less-dead” category of victim: a servant girl. On the road outside of town he encountered a thirteen-year-old girl headed into Vitoria on an errand. He seized her, carried her off the road into a ditch and strangled her until she lost consciousness. He then raped her and afterward strangled her to death. He left her body hidden in the ditch and returned to Vitoria by two o’clock that afternoon. The body was discovered the next day, but again there were no witnesses or any obvious suspects.

  Eight days later Garayo hired a twenty-nine-year-old prostitute to meet him at dusk outside town. He instructed her to walk a distance ahead of him in order that witnesses would not see them together. When they arrived at the agreed-upon place and had sex Garayo again provoked his victim by underpaying her. When she argued he strangled her. He thought he had killed her but then she moved; so he plucked out her long, spikelike hairpin from her hair, straightened it out and drove it through her heart. Her body was found next to a stream. A passing soldier was held in custody until he was cleared, and after that no further suspects came to anyone’s attention. There was now a townwide panic, with many women refusing to step outside alone day or night, but when no further murders took place, eventually things settled down. And of course, unlike in modern times, there was no police department or investigators trying to solve the murders.

  In August 1873 Garayo attempted to strangle another prostitute but her screams brought people to the scene. Garayo fled before he could be identified.

  In June 1874 he attempted to strangle a sickly beggar woman on the road outside of town; again her cries brought people to the scene and again Garayo fled. But the beggar woman identified him; she said Garayo was drunk and attacked her for no reason. But nobody bothered to file a complaint with the gendarmerie about an assault on a “less-dead” homeless beggar.

  The attacks then inexplicably ceased for four years.

  In 1876 Garayo’s alcoholic wife suddenly died, from an undetermined cause. A month later he married his fourth and last wife, Juana Ibisate, an aged widow. After his arrest Garayo was questioned about his third wife’s mysterious death but he insisted that he had not murdered her; he had no reason to lie, as he had confessed to the other murders.

  On November 1, 1878, Garayo attacked a miller in her kitchen as she was cooking. He attempted to strangle her, but the muscular woman overpowered him instead and forced him to flee. She identified him and filed a complaint with the gendarmes. Garayo was sentenced to two months in prison. He was now fifty-seven years old . . . over-the-hill in the male serial-killer “career” curve.

  On August 25, 1879, Garayo attacked a beggar woman on the road, but she beat him off and ran into Vitoria, screaming. Garayo asked his wife to negotiate a settlement with the woman and fled town to wait until things cooled off. The beggar woman accepted eighty reals not to file a complaint with the police.

  On September 7, after receiving news that it was safe to return home, Garayo was on the road back to Vitoria when he encountered María Dolores Cortázar, a twenty-five-year-old servant girl headed in the same direction with a basket of food. He accompanied her along the way in conversation, passing a postal worker on his route. When he was sure that there was nobody to interrupt him he suddenly pushed the woman off the road, seized her scarf, tied it tightly around her neck and demanded sex. When she resisted, he threatened her with a knife, and when she continued to resist, he stabbed her several times in the chest and proceeded to rape her. Believing her still alive, he then fatally stabbed her in the stomach and abdomen. Garayo hid the girl’s body and her basket, and instead of returning to Vitoria, he now ran off into the hills.

  At this point Garayo was beginning to manifest that frenzied self-destructive escalation that some serial killers embark upon. Ted Bundy is probably the most dramatic example of a serial-killer meltdown. On trial in Colorado for coldly and calculatingly murdering numerous women, Bundy escaped and made his way across the country all the way to Florida, where he proceeded to run wild. In Tallahassee he slipped into the Chi Omega sorority house, full of sleeping girls, and in a span of fifteen frenzied minutes, Bundy killed, raped, bit, chewed, battered, strangled and mutilated two college girls and attacked two more, who barely survived their severe injuries. On his way out of town he attacked a fifth victim eight blocks away, severely injuring her. Fleeing from the national media and public heat of the “Chi Omega murders,” Bundy then crazily drove a stolen vehicle to Lake City, where he snatched a twelve-year-old girl from her junior high school whil
e she was on an errand for her teacher. He raped and murdered the girl and left her body in a pig shed thirty-five miles away. These alarming, rageful murders led to Bundy’s quick apprehension a few days later. This kind of personality disintegration can occur when a serial killer either begins to take stock of his own madness or feels disillusioned and depressed that his murders are not living up to his fantasies. It’s a form of serial-killer burnout, at which point some surrender, some commit suicide, some retire and never kill again, and some go into a frenzied kamikaze mode.

  Like Bundy, Garayo was now flailing, hesitating to return to Vitoria from the hill country. He ended up sleeping under a bridge that night. In the morning he entered a town and purchased breakfast at an inn before heading back out into the countryside. On a nearby hilltop he encountered fifty-two-year-old farmer Manuela Audicana returning from a market with a basket of food. Garayo engaged her in conversation, telling her he was searching for a lost mare. When it suddenly began to rain, the two of them took shelter beneath a tree, whereupon Garayo propositioned the woman. When she attempted to flee, he overpowered her and strangled her with her own apron until she lost consciousness. He stripped off her clothes and attempted to rape her but found himself unable to complete the act. In a rage, he then stabbed the woman in the heart, slashed open her abdomen and extracted her intestines and her kidney. Afterward he wiped his hands on the victim’s dress, threw her clothing over her corpse and ate the food in her basket. He slept under a bridge a second night. In the morning he cleaned himself up, tossed his weapon into the river and headed home to Vitoria. No sooner had he gotten home than news came that two slain women were found in the countryside that same morning. After changing his clothes, Garayo fled again.