Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  TWELVE

  Red Tide Rising: Serial Killers in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 1900–1950

  How she did kick, bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it.

  —CHILD KILLER AND CANNIBAL ALBERT FISH, IN AN ANONYMOUS LETTER TO A VICTIM’S MOTHER, 1934

  Everything a girl could wish for.

  —DR. J. PAUL DE RIVER, LAPD’S FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST, ON THE “SERIAL SADIST RAFFINÉ (GENTEEL SADIST)”

  By the time Joseph Vacher was brought to justice, we knew almost as much about serial killers as we do today, but we kept forgetting it. The investigation and trial of Vacher in 1897 to 1898 was conducted in much the same way as hundreds of serial-murder cases would be in the twentieth century: through case signature linkage, then with luck fingerprint or other forensic trace evidence; but for most of the century a successful suspect interview with a resulting confession remained key for a conviction.

  The repertoire of forensic investigative techniques expanded slowly over the century: fingerprint and bite-mark identification, blood-content and splatter-pattern analysis, chemical analysis, hair and fiber identification. But serial murder’s root causes continued to confound criminologists and psychologists.

  Forensic sciences in the United States were late in their development, probably because of the American predilection for proactive gun-slinging-sheriff-style law enforcement as opposed to the plodding European investigative-magistrate approach. American forensic scientists are not as celebrated as France’s Alexandre Lacassagne or Edmond Locard. For example, it was only recently that one of America’s forensic pioneers, “Detective X,” was identified as Dr. Wilmer Souder of the National Bureau of Standards in the US Department of Commerce (today the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST]). Souder helped the FBI set up its crime lab in the 1930s and provided forensic analysis to various federal agencies from the 1920s until his retirement in the 1950s. For the protection of his family he was typically referred to only as “Detective X.”1

  THE GLOBAL RISE OF SERIAL KILLERS

  In my first book, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, I focused on the rise of early- to mid-twentieth-century serial killers and some of the more notorious cases in detail. I update and outline that history here, touching on some of the seminal cases in a more abbreviated form.

  European serial killers continued to make their appearance in the twentieth century, with a “hot spot” of notorious lust serial killers in the chaos and degradation of post–World War I Germany. One of the earliest known gay serial killers, Fritz Haarmann, aged forty-five at his arrest, raped and murdered twenty-seven young men in Hanover between 1918 and 1924. Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf,” stabbed, strangled and battered at least nine and maybe as many as thirty women and girls between 1913 and 1930.

  While Kürten’s and Haarmann’s cases are both well documented because they went to trial, several other cases in Germany during the same period are more obscure. In Berlin, Georg Karl Grossman is believed to have killed as many as fifty people between 1913 and 1920 and sold their flesh at a hot dog stand he kept at a railway station. Grossman was convicted in one murder and committed suicide on the eve of his execution. In Silesia in 1924, police found the remains of at least thirty men and women pickled in jars in the kitchens of serial killer Karl Denke’s inn. Suspected in the murder of as many as forty-two victims, Denke committed suicide in police custody before he could be brought to trial.

  There were two notorious sexual serial killers apprehended in Nazi Germany. Bruno Ludke is thought to have killed as many as fifty-one women between the late 1920s and 1943, when he was arrested for strangling a woman near his home. Ludke stabbed or strangled all his victims and had sex with the corpses. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was turned over to the Nazi SS for medical experiments, during which he died on April 8, 1944. Paul Ogorzov was a railway employee and a member of the Nazi Party’s Brownshirt storm troopers in Berlin; he raped and murdered eight women, battering them with a length of railway cable and throwing some of them off moving trains. He was convicted of the murders and executed in 1941.

  In Jack the Ripper’s homeland of Britain between 1910 and 1914, George Smith killed three of his seven wives. During the blitz of London in 1942, Gordon Frederick Cummins, the “Blackout Killer,” murdered and mutilated four women Jack the Ripper style under the cover of wartime darkness. In France, Henri Désiré Landru, “Bluebeard,” killed eleven aspiring brides between 1915 and 1922. Dr. Marcel Petiot in Paris killed at least sixty-three Jewish refugees hiding from the Nazis between 1941 and 1944 and seized their belongings. His serial murders seemed to be profit motivated.

  One can only imagine how many still-undigitized European newspapers from Holland, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal, Russia and so on must contain reports of forgotten serial-murder cases from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Germany, Italy and France are well documented because of their robust forensic-sciences tradition, as are Britain’s.

  There is no reason, however, to assume that the rates of serial homicide in Africa, Asia and South and Central America were not comparable to Europe’s. For example, newspapers in 1906 reported the execution of a serial killer in Morocco, Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, for the murder of thirty-six women.2 Francisco Guerrero Pérez, “El Chalequero,” a Mexican “ripper,” murdered twenty-one women between 1880 and 1908. Also in Mexico, twenty-seven-year-old chemistry student Gregorio “Goyo” Cárdenas Hernández lured to his “laboratory” and strangled three prostitutes and his girlfriend, the daughter of a prominent Mexican lawyer, in August and September 1942. There was evidence of torture, necrophilia, black magic and even mad-scientist medical experiments at the crime scenes. While in prison Hernández became a celebrity figure and the darling of psychologists, who maintained he could be reformed. In 1976 he was declared rehabilitated and was pardoned by the president of Mexico. He became a practicing lawyer in Mexico City, and in 1992 he successfully sued theater director Raúl Quintanilla for misrepresenting his life in a play. Hernández died in 1999.3

  The Radford University/FGCU Serial Killer Database lists 126 serial killers outside of the United States between 1900 and 1950, but that number is very likely low and as more obscure foreign-language newspapers become digitized, searches will very likely reveal numerous serial-killer cases that were either forgotten, not recognized as such or simply underreported.4

  SERIAL KILLING IN THE USA, 1900–1950

  Between 1900 and 1950 the incidence of reported serial murder in the United States was slowly but steadily increasing. If we include female serial killers and profit killers, 171 serial killers made their appearance over the span of those 50 years, an average of about 3 new serial killers every year (3.4, precisely). There is, however, an ominous arc to that average. The number increased from about 20 serial killers per decade in the 1910s to as many as 40 serial killers per decade by the 1930s and 1940s (still low compared to the “epidemic” decades: 534 new serial killers appeared in the 1970s, 692 in the 1980s and 614 in the 1990s!).5

  According to historian Philip Jenkins, the author of Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide, the 1980s serial-killer “epidemic” was preceded in the first half of the century by two smaller serial-killer “epidemics.” Jenkins identified two earlier surges of serial homicides in the United States: 1911–1915 and 1935–1941.6

  The First American Serial-Killer Surge, 1911–1915

  Looking through back issues of the New York Times, Jenkins found reports of 17 serial killers in just 5 years, between 1911 and 1915. Henry Lee Moore, for example, was a traveling serial killer who murdered more than 23 people—entire families. But little is known about him—he is a mere footnote. In September 1911, using an ax, Moore killed 6 victims in Colorado Springs—a man, two women,
and 4 children. In October he killed 3 people in Monmouth, Illinois, and then he slaughtered a family of 5 in Ellsworth, Kansas, the same month. In June 1912, he killed a couple in Paola, Kansas, and several days later he killed an entire family of 8 people, including 4 children, in Villisca, Iowa. Moore then returned home to Columbia, Missouri, where he murdered his mother and grandmother. For this he was arrested and convicted in December 1912. But Moore was not immediately linked to the previous crimes until a federal agent investigating the Villisca homicides was informed by his father, a warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary with contacts throughout the prison system, of the nature of Henry Lee Moore’s crimes in Missouri. Another typical case of “linkage blindness.”

  In another case, 20 biracial or light-skinned African-American women were murdered on the streets of Atlanta, with mutilations similar to those perpetrated by Jack the Ripper. Between May 20 and July 1, 1911, the unknown killer murdered his first 7 victims like clockwork, one every Saturday night.

  In Denver and Colorado Springs in 1911 and 1912, 7 women were bludgeoned to death by an unidentified perpetrator.

  Between January 1911 and April 1912, 49 victims were killed in unsolved ax murders in Texas and Louisiana. Very similar to the Moore murders, entire families were wiped out: a mother and her 3 children hacked to death in their beds in Rayne, Louisiana, in January 1911; 10 miles away in Crowley, Louisiana, 3 members of the Byers family in February 1911; 2 weeks later, a family of 4 in Lafayette. In April the killer struck in San Antonio, Texas, killing a family of 5. All the victims were killed in their beds at night and nothing was stolen from their homes. In November 1911 the killer returned to Lafayette and killed a family of 6; in January 1912 a woman and her 3 children were killed in Crowley. Two days later, at Lake Charles, a family of 5 was killed in their beds. In February 1912 the killer murdered a woman and her 3 children in Beaumont, Texas. In March, a man and a woman and her 4 children were hacked to death in Glidden, Texas, while they slept. In April a family of 5 was killed in San Antonio again, and 2 nights later, 3 were killed in Hempstead, Texas. The murders were never solved and the case has only recently been explored in a book by Todd C. Elliot, The Axes of Evil: The True Story of the Ax-Men Murders.

  In New York City a “ripper” killed a five-year-old girl, Lenora Cohn, inside her apartment building on March 19, 1915. The victim’s mother received taunting letters afterward signed “H. B. Richmond, Jack-the-Ripper” and threatening to kill again. On May 3, he may have killed a four-year-old boy playing in a hallway and stuffed his body under a tenement staircase. The offender was never identified, nor were the two cases definitively linked.

  Also in New York City, in 1915 the corpses of 15 newborn infants were recovered, suspected to be linked to some sort of “baby farm” operation. That same year 6 bodies with their skulls crushed were found hidden in a farmhouse being demolished in Niagara, North Dakota. The victims, who were dropped into the basement through a clever trapdoor, were all farmhands who had been employed by the former house owner, Eugene Butler, who had died in 1913. There were numerous hospital and nursing home serial murderers and female poisoners rounding out the number of serial killers in this period.

  These murders were all spectacular crimes, some widely reported in their time, others not, but all are mostly forgotten today. Jack the Ripper with his 5 or 6 victims is immortalized, but the Louisiana-Texas ax murderer with 49 victims is mostly forgotten. The primary difference is that London in 1888 was the center of a huge global English-language newspaper industry while North Dakota, Louisiana and Texas were not. The story of Jack the Ripper was retold endlessly and entered popular myth and literature—while the Louisiana-Texas ax murderer faded from public consciousness. Like real estate, serial murder “epidemics” are as much about location, location, location as they are about the killing.

  The Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database lists a total of 34 new serial killers emerging in the decade of 1910 to 1919.

  The 1916–1934 Serial-Killer “Interlude”

  Once the United States went to war in Europe in 1917 there appeared to be a lull in reports of sexual serial killing, but other forms of serial killing thrived. After World War I the affluent “Roaring Twenties” were a Jazz Age of serial-killing celebrity gangsters, spates of kidnapping, lynching and wanton thrill killing like the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder of a boy in Chicago in 1924.

  Domestic terrorism in the US supplanted serial killings in newspaper headlines. In April 1919, a shadowy anarchist group sent 36 mail bombs to prominent politicians and appointees across the United States. Then terrorists detonated what is sometimes said to be the first “car bomb,” a horse-drawn wagon packed with TNT and metal slugs, on Wall Street in New York at lunch hour on September 16, 1920, killing 38 people and seriously wounding 143.

  Overall murder in the United States increased by 77 percent between 1920 and 1933.7 Sexual serial killing still went on, but it was no longer front-page news, despite the fact that it was becoming pathologically stranger, with increasing reports of necrophilia and cannibalism. Yet during this “interlude” period, some of the most shocking cases of serial homicide occurred. Necrophile serial killer Earle Leonard Nelson, the “Dark Stranger Gorilla Killer,” was apprehended in 1927 after killing 22 women and having sex with their corpses; Gordon Northcott, the “Wineville Chicken Coop Murderer,” raped and killed at least 3 children in California in 1928; and the notorious cannibal child murderer Albert Fish, the “Werewolf of Wisteria” or the “Gray Man,” was active in New York from 1928 to 1935. In 1928 he lured ten-year-old Grace Budd from her parents, killed and ate her, and several years later infamously sent the victim’s mother a letter in which he described how he’d killed and cooked her daughter. Fish admitted to killing, mutilating and cannibalizing two other children and was suspected in five other similar murders of male and female children and youths between the ages of four and seventeen.

  The Second American Serial-Killer Surge, 1935–1950

  By the 1930s, the American public was familiar with both the phenomenon and character of serial killers without using the term itself. The multiple murderer was becoming a stereotypical character, and even played for laughs, as in the 1939 play Arsenic and Old Lace, a black comedy about a family of serial killers, including two dotty aunts who murder lonely old men via homemade wine laced with arsenic, and their nephew, a migratory serial killer of twelve victims around the world. The play was adapted into a hit movie directed by Frank Capra.

  From the twelve unsolved “Cleveland Torso Murders,” mutilation killings of derelicts in the mid-1930s; to the twenty suspected murders by Joe Ball, the “Alligator Man” and “Butcher of Elmendorf,” in Texas in the 1930s; to Jake Bird’s “Axeman of Tacoma” murders of as many as forty-six victims between 1930 and 1947, the United States saw some 127 serial killers appear between 1900 and 1950, at an average rate of five new serial killers every two years.

  DEFINING THE “TED BUNDY–TYPE” POSTMODERN SADIST RAFFINÉ (GENTEEL SADIST), 1949

  New Orleans–born psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River was the first forensic psychiatrist permanently hired by a law enforcement agency in the United States. The LAPD assigned him to the Sex Offense Bureau in 1939; his job was to assist police in profiling unknown suspects and to prepare prosecutorial psychiatric assessments of accused offenders to preempt any potential insanity defense. In 1949, de River would publish The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytical Study, his update of Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. In it, de River described recent paraphilic sexual crimes in California and revised and expanded the psychiatric terminology, including the concept of the “mask of sanity” psychopath as described by Hervey Milton Cleckley in 1941.

  De River stripped away the notions of vulgar, crude, foaming-at-the-mouth werewolf “monster” serial killers and introduced a new typology of offender that we recognize today in many postmodern serial killers. De River labeled this new species the sadist raf
finé (genteel sadist). He described them thus:

  The genteel “nice boy” type, whose suave manner and smooth tongue ingratiates him in the favor of his victim. He may be studious and pedantic and often strives to give one the impression of being very religious. His genteel manner and fastidious appearance, together with a winning personality, dimpled chin, wavy hair, usually offset by dreamy, neuropathic eyes, are very often everything a girl could wish for.8

  De River could have been describing the sadistic necrophile serial killer Ted Bundy when he wrote those lines, except Ted Bundy was only three years old at the time. That in itself is of great significance, because Bundy was part of a new generation of so-called “golden age” serial killers to come, and the society he was growing up in would have much, if not everything, to do with the murders he would perpetrate as an adult in the 1970s.

  From 1950 to 2000, some 2,065 new serial killers would appear, overshadowing the relatively small but steady rise in serial killing in the first five decades of the twentieth century.9

  THIRTEEN