While most of his research examined the effects of diseases such as typhoid, tetanus, the bubonic plague and anthrax on human beings, Shiro also observed and minutely charted the levels of human endurance. Prisoners were hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death; they were frozen and their limbs were hacked off one by one to measure the effects of frostbite. Military researchers also tied their prisoners to posts and bombed them (in order to chart the impact and distribution of bomb fragments), roasted them with massive volts of electricity and injected their kidneys with horse urine. Many of the prisoners, after being injected with plagues, were then autopsied while still alive and without anaesthetic.
One medical assistant who had worked under Shiro during World War II later recalled in an interview with the New York Times: ‘The fellow knew that it was over for him and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.’
As well as these truly hideous crimes, Shiro also managed to spread anthrax, the bubonic plague and cholera to Chinese villages, raising his body count by another astounding 250,000 men, women and children.
After the defeat of the Japanese by the Allied forces, MacArthur secretly offered Shiro immunity in return for information gathered from his research into bio-warfare. He was never prosecuted and died of throat cancer in 1967.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SERIAL-KILLER GROUPIES: MEET THE WOMEN WHO LOVE KILLERS
For some women only the ultimate bad boy will do.
When serial killers are caught and go to trial, they often receive fan mail, love letters and marriage proposals. Brooding Richard Ramirez, convicted of 13 murders, found love in the arms of a freelance magazine editor, Doreen Lioy, who had to compete with hundreds of fellow admirers for his affections. They married in San Quentin jail in 1996 and in fact Lioy is rumoured to be planning on suicide when her Satanist husband is finally executed. Even the infamous Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual who was convicted of killing 15 men, left a flock of heartbroken female admirers in his wake. Serial killer poster boy Ted Bundy confessed to over 30 murders, but hordes of women vied for his attention at his trial. He even proposed to Carole Ann Boone, a former colleague, just before he was sentenced to death for the second time – an offer she accepted.
The most notorious serial-killer groupie of all time was Veronica Lynn Compton. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr – who killed several Los Angeles women in the 1970s – were facing murder charges when Compton approached Bianchi, claiming she wanted his opinion on a play she was writing about serial killers. Soon the pair were exchanging letters, prompting Bianchi to ask Compton to copycat his crimes in an effort to clear his name. She was to leave evidence at the murder scene, leading police to believe that the real killer was still at large.
Bianchi was a non-secretor, meaning that (in those days) his blood type could not be determined by seminal fluid or saliva. He collected his sperm in a rubber glove, stashed it in a book and gave it to Compton when she visited him in prison. Compton travelled to Washington, where she tried (unsuccessfully) to strangle a woman she met in a bar.
Convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison, Compton soon sparked up a postal relationship with another serial killer, Douglas Clarke, a.k.a. ‘The Sunset Strip Slayer’. In 1983, Clarke was found guilty on six counts of murder and sentenced to death. Compton and he soon began exchanging letters, discussing the delights of necrophilia and wondering ‘why others don’t see the necrophiliac aspects of existence as we do’ (Compton to Clarke). Clarke also sent Compton a Valentine’s card with a drawing of a headless corpse. He had, on at least one occasion, had sex with a victim’s decapitated head.
So who are these women who throw themselves so willingly at lunatics? To find out, I talked to groupies, pen-pals, frequent Death Row visitors and women engaged to Death Row inmates.
IGNORING THE MONSTER
While killer groupies are by no means a new phenomenon, the way they befriend murderers today is changing. Numerous prisoner websites and online pen-pal services now help groupies search for their chosen criminal.
Sally (not her real name) works as a desk clerk in Santa Fe in California, and belongs to a group that sends books to Death Row prisoners. She’s been a pen-pal to several prisoners, and is a regular visitor on Death Row. ‘I find condemned convicts to be basically very nice and polite,’ she says. ‘Actually, I feel more comfortable writing them than I do with the jerks out here. I even went to visit one every Sunday for ten months. He’s the nicest guy I ever met.’ The nice guy turns out to be Robert Consalvo, who stabbed a woman to death in 1991 when she found him trying to rob her apartment. ‘We get along great. We were writing for several months, so it was like visiting a friend.’
Sally also writes regularly to Charles Ng, one of the most notorious serial killers of all time. In 1998, Ng was sentenced to death on 11 counts of murder (including the murder of two baby boys) and now awaits the gas chamber in San Quentin. Ng teamed up with his best pal Leonard Lake to abduct, rape and torture female victims while videotaping the atrocities in the basement of Lake’s cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Like many groupies, Sally is quick to defend her deranged pen-pal. ‘I think, if Charles hadn’t run into Leonard Lake, he’d never have killed anyone. He’s a nice guy, but on the emotionally needy side. He doesn’t talk about his case as he’s still in the appeal process. He talks about his family – growing up in Hong Kong and what’s happening in prison. He likes to do origami.’
Sally is a member of a web list called Killer Groupies. The owner of the list, Kimba D’Michi, began tracking current serial killers’ cases in the media eight years ago via online list services. ‘Our news list began to attract members who held a strange sympathy for serial killers and in some cases a sensual attraction,’ D’Michi says. ‘While I was curious about what makes a person a serial-killer fan, these folks were not appropriate for our news list and, to be frank, were often attacked by other list members who just didn’t understand how anyone could admire a serial killer. So we started the groupies list.
‘Groupies come from all walks of life. We seem to have groupie mums, teenagers, and most seem to be young, under-25-year-old women. These people seem to find the human side of these monsters, and are able to ignore the ugly monster within. They often feel that the killer is misunderstood, was abused, was driven to commit their crimes by circumstances of their upbringing and lives. The key word is they excuse the crimes due to circumstance.
‘They want to see a nice man, so they see one. To gain closeness in such an interpersonal way with someone who’s committed heinous acts, and to blind themselves to that person, also makes them co-dependent. They need the positive interaction with this killer to quantify themselves in some way.’
D’Michi uses Ian Brady as an example of how a groupie’s mind might rationalise the attraction. ‘They would think I can make Brady out to be a nice man. See, if the right woman were there for him instead of Myra Hindley, then he’d never have committed those crimes. I can see the real him even if no one else can. They are looking to be the Madonna, the one woman in the world who can turn these men around.’
One of the members of D’Michi’s list is girlfriend to Melinda Loveless. In 1992, the aptly named Loveless, then aged 16, stabbed, beat and tortured to death 12-year-old Shanda Sharer. In fact, Sharer’s murder represents one of the most harrowing crimes in recent memory (certainly one of the worst this writer has come across). Along with fellow psychopath Laurie Tackett, Loveless spent hours torturing the helpless 12-year-old, whom Loveless blamed for stealing her girlfriend. After smashing her repeatedly in the
head with a tyre iron in the boot of Tackett’s car, they dumped her in a field, poured petrol on her and burned her alive. Loveless, who lit the match, will be released in 2052.
Incredible as it may seem, since then, Loveless has found someone on the outside who is head over heels in love with her and who says she will be waiting for her when she gets out.
D’Michi explains, ‘The girl met Melinda Loveless through her aunt, who volunteers at a Christian prison outreach programme. They started out writing letters and fell in love. Loveless’s girlfriend makes no excuses for her relationships and she says that her family is non-appreciative about her closeness with Melinda Loveless, but they tolerate it all the same.
‘She also seems to glow in the fact she knows things about Melinda that she can share with the list. It made her a celebrity to be Melinda’s girlfriend. I don’t think this type of attention was her motivation, though. I believe it’s a side effect that the groupies embrace and flaunt when it suits them, because the audience on the Killer Groupies website are interested in each other and are nice to each other. They are not criticising them for their ties to killers.’
BAD BOY FANTASIES
Many psychologists and sexologists believe that falling for a killer is a result of a psychological disorder called hybristophilia, otherwise known as the ‘Bonnie and Clyde syndrome’. Famed sexologist John Money coined the term and describes hybristophilia as a condition that can cause women to become attracted, or even sexually aroused, by ‘marauding or predator type partners’.
According to his definition, ‘Sexuerotic arousal and facilitation and attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent on being with a partner known to have committed an outrage or crime, such as rape, murder or armed robbery.’
Serial-killer groupies openly mock the term, saying that it completely misses the point. This isn’t about sex, they argue, as there is absolutely no sex involved at all.
There are, of course, other psychological explanations for the phenomenon, all of which are dismissed equally out of hand by groupies. Some theorists say that the groupies are simply after the notoriety a bad-boy killer boyfriend can give them, while others argue that groupies find purpose and meaning in their lives by taking on a killer lover. A groupie, particularly if they are religious, can devote themselves entirely to taking their man away from the path of wickedness on to which he has inadvertently strayed.
Having said that, the reasons for dating a killer behind bars are usually far more mundane. At first sight, it might not seem practical to actually be involved with someone whom you might never meet outside visiting hours, but the arrangement is actually quite sensible if seen from a certain angle. Besides their notoriety, captured bad-boy killers make curiously perfect partners. After all, they can’t cheat (not with another woman, at least) and you always know where they are. You don’t have to live with them day in day out, so they won’t get on your nerves and destroy any idealised fantasy you have of them. And if you’re afraid of sexual intimacy, that’s another problem solved.
Moreover, there’s inevitably an element of high drama associated with a killer on Death Row. If you believe (as most groupies do) that their boyfriend is innocent, the situation can give rise to a thrilling sense of righteous anger – ‘We’re in this together!’ Even if the groupie does recognise that their killer boyfriend is guilty, they quickly become convinced that he has repented and is now a reformed character, that they are in love with a completely different person to the person who committed that terrible crime all those years ago.
Those who take it beyond the pen-pal stage and have become romantically involved with killers can share their experiences through other websites, such as Prisontalk.com. Here they can discuss issues of sex (or lack of it), share notes on how hard it is to carry on a relationship through letters and infrequent visits, chat about how their family and friends ‘just don’t get it’, and exchange sickly sweet anecdotes on how cute and attentive their killer was in their last letter or phone call.
In almost all cases, the relationship seems to begin with a letter; they become pen-pals; it moves on to a jail visit. Suddenly, the groupie can’t believe what is happening: she feels as if she has known this guy forever. Some of them are already involved in a serious relationship. But the killer and the groupie just have so much in common. He’s so sensitive and such a good listener too. He knows all of her secrets. She can tell him anything. He’s her best friend in the world ever. Before you know it, love blooms.
Do they intentionally set out to fall in love with a killer? According to the numerous groupies I talked to, the opposite is true. Many claimed they fought very hard not to. Falling in love with a killer is apparently something that ‘just happens’.
THE MAN OF MY DREAMS
Frank and Suzy, who is 38 (both names have been changed), met through a pen-pal ad. He’s been on Death Row in the US for ten years and has had two death warrants signed, both of which were stayed. Suzy was watching a programme on TV about women who love men in prison when they mentioned a site where you could contact a prisoner (Prisonpen-pals.com). Now the couple are engaged.
‘Out of complete boredom and curiosity I looked at the site,’ she says. ‘I went through a hundred or so ads, just curious, and I came across Frank’s. I can’t explain it, but I felt compelled to write to him. We wrote for a few months and it became clear he was really special. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with him. In December I went and saw him for the first time, and I knew then there was no going back. Now I see him every two months as he lives in Georgia, and I live in Minneapolis.’
Although Suzy didn’t want to go into the details of her fiancé’s crime or give his proper name, she does admit he stands accused of murdering a young girl. But she believes he’s innocent. ‘I have to believe this for my own sanity. The crime was horrific. I know my man’s heart, and there’s no way he could have done it.’
Suzy certainly doesn’t fit the mould of the typical clinging, insecure and obsessed Death Row fiancée. She has a degree, a busy life and no fear of men or intimacy in any way. Before she met Frank, she’d had several ‘normal’ relationships and was even married. ‘It just turned out that the man of my dreams happens to be sitting on Death Row,’ she says. ‘We have a connection I’ve never experienced before. I’ve never been treated so well, or with so much respect. When he asked me to marry him I had no doubts – there was no hesitation at all.’
While Suzy has found love with one convicted murderer, the undisputed queen of serial-killer groupies is the crime writer Sondra London, who dated future serial killer Gerard Schaefer when she was 17. Later, in 1973, Schaefer was found guilty of murdering Susan Place and Georgia Jessup, and is suspected of slaying another 30 women at least. Shaefer (who used to be a policeman) was murdered in his cell by fellow inmate Vincent Rivera.
London contacted her childhood sweetheart in prison 16 years after his arrest and helped him publish Killer Fiction – a gruesome series of short stories and drawings found in Schaefer’s house after his arrest, all of which feature the savage torture and murder of women and clearly reflect his fantasies and suspected crimes. In 1991, the two were engaged. Soon afterwards, however, London met a younger killer, Danny Rolling, and got engaged to him instead. (See Chapter Five for more on Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper.)
London also flirted with Keith Hunter Jesperson, known as the ‘Happy Face Killer’. Jesperson committed eight murders in five states, dumping the bodies in woodlands. He got his nickname because of the smiling faces he drew on taunting letters he sent to the police, in which he boasted of his crimes. Like most serial killers, Jesperson started out on harmless animals. When he was 20, he was choking cats and dogs in the middle of a field near his home. He would later say that strangling a human being and strangling an animal gave him much the same feeling.
For dating and falling in love with such notorious killers, as well as providing all three with an outlet to publicise their views, London attra
cted a lot of bad publicity for herself. So what does she think about being called a serial-killer groupie? ‘There are things going on the public is not aware of. It’s all inexplicable, yet I can’t be the one to explain it,’ she told me, somewhat mysteriously. ‘I don’t choose to publicly analyse and explain what’s been or is being done to me. There’s no percentage in that, and there are so many reasons to remain silent. I’m content to walk away from the deconstruction of my good name, considering the alternatives. At this time I have no purpose or ambition. I am inactive and non-participatory.’
With such figures as London on the scene, ‘serial-killer groupie’ is a term most women involved with imprisoned murderers utterly despise. Keshia lives in New York and is close pals with Kendall Francois, a former school caretaker who killed eight women in Poughkeepsie. Branded the ‘Black Pillsbury Doughboy’ by Fred Rosen in his account of the case, Body Dump, Francois targeted prostitutes, whom he strangled and then left to rot in his house.
‘The term “serial-killer groupie”, it’s like someone trying to say we are, like, obsessed or in love with serial killers,’ says Keshia. ‘Not that I care – let people think what they like. My friends and family tend to think I have this strange fascination with killers, like a fetish or whatever.’ Keshia has been writing to Francois for a few months now. She hasn’t visited him yet but plans to do so as soon as she gets the chance.
‘He’s an awesome person and a very caring guy, and tends to put a lot of thought into what he has to say. He’s a good friend and we don’t really talk about the fact he killed eight people – it’s not something he likes to bring up, and nor do I. It’s not something he really likes to remember. I mean, you have to understand that he’s locked up.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 20