American Gothic: The “Golden Age” of Serial Killers, 1950–2000
Big numbers are better than small numbers; official numbers are better than unofficial numbers; and big, official numbers are best of all.
—JOEL BEST, “MISSING CHILDREN, MISLEADING STATISTICS”
The years between 1950 and 2000 have sometimes been called the “golden age” of serial killers.1 While there had been numerous small surges of serial killing in the past as described in these pages, their scope and number were incomparable to the peak “epidemic” surge of the 1970s to the 1990s. In the middle of that era, we coined the term “serial killer,” creating an entirely new phenomenon in our political, social, psychological, forensic and cultural discourse. Prior to that, serial killings were perceived as inexplicable, individual, monstrous acts of personal aberration. Now they became a part of something bigger than the individual perpetrator. As the number of serial killers began to multiply exponentially, so did their individual body counts, in a kind of macabre race to the top to see which serial killer would dominate news headlines in what new bizarre way and with what unimaginable number of victims. Serial killers became front-page news.
By the 1990s real and fictional serial killing was a major genre in literature, movies and television. Some serial-killer fictional characters were even elevated to the status of “antiheros,” like the movie versions of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial American Psycho. (Female serial-killer partner Karla Homolka testified that she had been reading American Psycho snuggled up on the couch downstairs while her husband, Paul Bernardo, was upstairs in their bedroom raping a schoolgirl they had abducted. When asked in cross-examination at her trial how she could bring herself to read as a girl was being raped upstairs, Homolka was insulted and replied she was entirely capable of “doing two things at the same time.”2)
In the meantime actual serial killers like Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi and Richard Ramirez were attracting followings of female groupies, although in view of the 1895 case of Theodore Durrant and the “Sweet Pea Girl,” that was not necessarily something new. What was new was how crazed this new generation of groupies was.
Carol (or Carole) Ann Boone, for example, met Ted Bundy when the two of them worked at the Washington State Department of Emergency Services (DES) in Olympia. After his arrest for a series of brutal necrophile murders, she faithfully attended Bundy’s trials in Florida, professing her undying love for him. During one of the televised trials, Bundy married Boone by taking advantage of an archaic Florida state law that allowed persons who declared marriage in front of a judge to be legally married. Despite Florida’s strict prohibition of conjugal visits for death-row inmates, Bundy managed to impregnate Boone, who gave birth to a girl the couple named Rose. It’s speculated that Boone had passed a condom to Bundy through a kiss and he later returned it to her the same way, with his sperm sealed inside.3
Kenneth Bianchi, who as one of the Hillside Stranglers abducted and killed ten women and killed another two on his own, began receiving letters in jail from Veronica Compton, a twenty-four-year-old fledgling playwright whose work was obsessed with sadomasochism and serial murder. Eventually she went to see him and they began a relationship. In the summer of 1980, Bianchi showed Compton how he strangled his victims, and he slipped her a sample of his sperm, secreted in the finger of a rubber glove. Compton then flew to Bellingham and lured a woman to her motel room, where she attempted to strangle her Bianchi-style. This was in an era before DNA testing, and the plan was to kill the woman in the same way Bianchi killed the others and make it look as if the killer was still at large by leaving a sperm trace with the same blood type as Bianchi’s. The victim, however, was more powerful than Compton and managed to escape. Compton was arrested shortly afterward.4
While in jail, Compton fell into a relationship through letters with another serial killer—Doug Clark, the necrophile “Sunset Boulevard Killer,” who murdered seven women. Compton was convicted of premeditated attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Compton was eventually paroled in 2003 and today is a writer, artist and musician working under the name Veronica Compton Wallace in Los Angeles.5
THE DAWN OF THE GOLDEN AGE
I would venture that the “golden age” of serial killers in the United States dawned metaphorically in 1945 to 1946 in Chicago with what is probably our first “self-aware” serial killer, seventeen-year-old William Heirens with his “For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more—I cannot control myself” lipstick “signature” serial murders. When he was arrested, police found a stolen copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in his possession.6 Heirens was closely followed by the serial-killing team of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the “Lonely Hearts Killers” or “Honeymoon Killers,” in 1949, followed by Ed Gein (1957), Harvey Glatman (1958), Melvin Rees (1959), and then Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” with his thirteen murders from 1962 to 1964, which were reported nationally in the media as they occurred, one by one.
After the Boston Strangler, there would be no turning back.
There was a kind of historical synchronicity with the Boston Strangler when he murdered one of his last victims on November 23, 1963, the day after the JFK assassination. As the nation mourned that Saturday afternoon in the somber gray light of black-and-white television, DeSalvo gained entry to twenty-three-year-old Sunday school teacher Joann Graff’s apartment, raped her and then strangled her with two nylon stockings intertwined with a leg of her black leotard, which he tied tightly around her neck in an exuberant gift bow, his signature.
In that narrow-channeled television world of the 1960s, serial murder would creep up on us along with a dramatic rise of other types of violence and mayhem, from self-immolating Buddhist monks going up in flames in Vietnam to JFK’s exploding head and Lee Harvey Oswald’s gutshot on live television. Things were getting ugly really fast.
At first we did not quite distinguish serial killing from all the other crazy violence surging in American society in the 1960s. It was just a part of the madness seizing the nation. The TV series Mad Men got its sixties violence chronology right, recalling most of the historic moments that seized our televised collective consciousness in one big rainbow of death and horror:
the Boston Strangler, 1962–1964;
the threat of thermonuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962;
the JFK assassination and the televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963;
the 1964 civil-rights-worker murders in Mississippi;
the 1965 Watts riots;
the Richard Speck murder of eight nurses in Chicago in July 1966;
the University of Texas sniper killing of sixteen people in Austin in August 1966;
the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967;
the 1968 Tet Offensive execution;
the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968;
the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968;
the Chicago police riot in August 1968;
and in the last year of the waning sixties, the Manson Family murders in August 1969.
The sixties just felt more murderous than the fifties. It seemed like a man-made plague of violence in the middle of an apocalyptic siege, with serial killers being catapulted like diseased carcasses over the protective walls of civilization harboring the tattered remains of the illusory innocent America we had believed in the decade before.
From the late 1960s through the 1990s, notorious serial killers began rising up among us in shit and dark, like homicidal mushrooms: Jerry Brudos, Richard Chase, Edmund Kemper, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Dean Corll, William Bonin, Herbert Mullin, Robert Hansen, Wayne Williams, Richard Cottingham, Gary Heidnik, Randy Kraft, Leonard Lake, Chares N
g, Bobby Joe Long, Gerard Schaefer, Gerald Stano, Joel Rifkin, Kenneth Bianchi, Angelo Buono, Arthur Shawcross, Richard Ramirez, Danny Rolling, Ottis Toole, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer and literally hundreds more. They comprised a pantheon of “superstar” serial killers who captured our imaginations as if they were sports stars or celebrities. With that came the emergence of serial-killer trading cards, calendars, lunch boxes, action figures and coloring books, and ancillary industries like the trafficking of serial-killer artifacts, artworks and autographs in the form of murderabilia.
The first really big-number serial-killing case to be reported nationally since the Boston Strangler was in California in May 1971. Even by today’s standards, the number was spectacular; police dug up twenty-five bodies in a peach orchard near Yuba City. Juan Corona, a green-card-holding Mexican labor contractor and father of four children, was charged with the murders. At the time, we did not “get it.” How could someone kill that many people without anybody noticing? It just did not compute. Nor was there much follow-up in the media; it looked like Corona was simply insane, and to boot, according to the press, he was some kind of closeted homosexual, and the victims were all transient illegal Mexican agricultural workers and maybe even gay too, a complete pass to write them off as “less-dead” victims nobody cared about. Many remain unidentified to this day.
Likewise, two years later in 1973, reports of the Dean Corll “Candy Man” murders of twenty-seven transient male youths in Houston, Texas, also quickly faded, for he was a “homo” and he was dead (murdered by his serial-killing junior partner), as were his disposable, delinquent runaway victims—no trial, no story. Again, nobody cared. They too were all “less-dead.”
The college town of Santa Cruz, California, with a population of only 135 thousand, had 26 killings at the hands of 3 local serial killers between 1970 and 1973, some kind of mad record for sure: John Linley Frazier, “Killer Prophet” (five victims); Herbert Mullin, “Die Song Killer” (thirteen victims); and Edmund Kemper, “Co-Ed Killer” (eight victims). In the wake of the 1969 Manson killings, the Santa Cruz murders were attributed to “drugged-out hippies.”
It was only in the mid-1970s, after Ted Bundy started abducting and killing middle-class white college girls at schools, shopping malls, ski chalets, national parks and public beaches, that the media suddenly began paying close attention. When Bundy was identified and apprehended, his classic “handsome devil” good looks and Republican Party credentials made the story sizzle. His subsequent escape from jail, additional murders, televised trial and bestselling biography by Ann Rule elevated him as the first of our postmodern superstar serial killers. Say the words “serial killer” and usually Ted Bundy’s name comes to mind.
In the 1970s an extraordinary 534 new serial killers appeared in the United States and another 692 in the subsequent 1980s and 614 more in the 1990s—a total of 1,840 serial killers between 1970 and 1999.7 We experienced some of these cases in the news as collectively as we did the first moon landing or the first heart transplant; they were historical and cultural milestones we all acknowledged the significance of and were all familiar with.
Americans had no other channels to flip away to, no web pages to surf and shop on or YouTube kittens to distract us from the carnage. It was mainlined into our cultural vein by network television and Hollywood; we were forced to look at the horror, as if we were all strapped in, with our eyelids forced open like Alex’s in the movie A Clockwork Orange, itself a cinematic artifact of the “ultraviolence” that would be drenching us for the next thirty years like blood from a fire hose.
THE MISSING MISSING AND THE GREAT SERIAL-KILLER “EPIDEMIC”
The heightened fear of serial killers in the 1970s was magnified by a general concern over a rising rate of all kinds of violence compared to the 1960s, from familial violence to mass murder, predatory street crime, assassination, domestic terrorism, riot and cult, gang and race murders, and it all became worse by the 1980s.
That great serial-killer “epidemic” panic of the early 1980s that would inspire Congressional hearings hammered into the collective American brain a fear and loathing of a dark, hidden yet at the same time humanly monstrous and intimate source of danger: the human werewolf or vampire, the lust erotophonophiliac, the compulsively driven zombie serial killer necrophile cannibal. The tenant upstairs with a roomful of severed heads. A zombie indeed, but one inside the fence, one living disguised among us. One of us.
I have already cited the statistics, but I’ll repeat them here. There was a tenfold increase in active serial killers per year in the 25-year period of 1970 to 1995, compared to the 169-year period of 1800 to 1969.8 Of 2,236 identified serial killers in the United States on record between 1900 and 2000, 82 percent (1,840) made their appearance in the last thirty years, 1970 to 2000.9
In 2010, Enzo Yaksic, a criminal justice scholar and serial-murder investigative consultant, after ten years of researching serial homicide, established the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative (SHEISC), which in 2013 partnered with professor Mike Aamodt at Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University to assemble and populate the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database, currently the most comprehensive shared database on incidents of serial murder.10
The database includes serial killers under the new FBI definition of two or more victims, and currently lists a total of 2,743 US serial killers (2,537 males and 206 females) and 1,325 international serial killers (1,168 males and 157 females), for a grand total of 4,068 male and female serial killers. It also contains data on 11,680 serial-killer victims from around the world.11
According to the Radford/FGCU database, in the first five decades of the twentieth century there was a slowly rising average of twenty to forty new serial killers every decade in the United States. But after 1960 the number of new serial killers per decade went viral:
1950–1960: 51
1960–1970: 174
1970–1980: 534
1980–1990: 692
1990–2000: 614
These figures add up to 2,065 “golden age” serial killers in the United States.
Estimating the number of serial killers and the number of their victims, however, presents a very treacherous statistical minefield, with the potential for both exaggeration and underestimation.
Kenna Quinet, a professor in criminal justice studies, reviewed the statistics and was horrified to discover how many possible serial killings might be unreported due to wrongly classified deaths in institutions, unidentified victims, “throwaway kids” whose parents don’t report them missing, missing foster children whose names are never published for privacy reasons (in some states the biological parents are prohibited from going to the media if their child was placed in foster care and goes missing), misidentified and elsewhere classified dead, and prostitutes who are not even reported missing. Quinet refers to this hidden subsurface stream of victims as “the missing missing.” Nobody even knows they are missing.
Extrapolating based on all these possible margins of error in the statistics, Quinet concluded in 2007, “By counting potentially hidden serial murder victims, we add a minimum number of 182 annual serial murder deaths . . . and as many as 1,832 uncounted annual serial murder deaths [added to the existing counts].”12
When investigative journalist Thomas Hargrove reviewed FBI murder statistics over a forty-year period since 1976 and compared them to local police statistics and news reports, he discovered that roughly twenty-seven thousand murders were not reported by local authorities to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) Program.13 Hargrove is concerned that this underreporting of murders might be concealing current serial-killer cases and founded the Murder Accountability Project (MAP) to track the problem. He has written computer code that data- mines homicide reports and statistics for anomalies that may reveal a serial pattern and lobbies local police agencies when MAP believes they are overlooking a possible ser
ial killer at large.
CONGRESS AND THE “SERIAL-KILLER EPIDEMIC,” 1981–1983
At the exact same time as the term “serial killer” was entering our popular vocabulary, Congress was embracing the concept of a “serial-killer epidemic.” Coincidentally, the same guy who we think coined the term serial killer also coined “serial-killer epidemic” when in the 1980s FBI behaviorist Robert Ressler stated, “Serial killing—I think it’s at an epidemic proportion. The type of crime we’re seeing today did not really occur with any known frequency prior to the fifties. An individual taking ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five lives is a relatively new phenomenon in the crime picture of the U.S.”14
There were three major committees on Capitol Hill from 1981 to 1983 that looked into the issues of increasing violence, linkage blindness, child abduction, child pornography, and serial killers: the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime, the House Committee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and Senator Arlen Specter’s Juvenile Justice Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.
The start of these hearings in 1981 was punctuated by several dramatic cases of child abduction murders in the US. In Atlanta, Wayne Williams was arrested for a series of thirty-one child murders; in New York, Etan Patz infamously vanished on his way to school (thirty-eight years later in February 2017, the boy’s killer was convicted);15 and in Florida, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished in a shopping mall. Adam’s severed head was found floating in a canal; his body was never recovered. Adam’s father, John Walsh, became a vocal advocate for victims and missing children, and the host of America’s Most Wanted. An out-of-state car was linked to the crime, but the perpetrator wasn’t identified until more than a decade later when serial killer Ottis Toole, Henry Lee Lucas’s partner, confessed to kidnapping and killing Adam. (Henry Lee Lucas dubiously claimed a total of 360 victims, some on his own, some with Toole as they roamed the highways.)
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