CHAPTER 6

FROM JACK THE RIPPER TO TED BUNDY, SERIAL MURDERERS HAVE SOUGHT OUT VICTIMS WHO WERE TRUSTING, AVAILABLE, AND VULNERABLE.

FEW CRIMINALS ARE MORE TERRIFYING THAN SERIAL MURDERERS. BUT SOME POPULAR GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT THEM ARE JUST PLAIN WRONG.

Real-life serial killers may be rare, but they’ve been the subject of countless articles, books, movies and television shows, and are part of our collective nightmares. Over the years, the media has assembled an almost generic profile for such murderers: They’re white male outcasts. They’re evil geniuses and sexual predators who target women and children. They keep “trophies,” or souvenirs, from their kills. Yet the reality is more complicated and nuanced.

As defined by the FBI, serial murder is “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” Criminals who fit this description are racially diverse; according to the agency, the distribution of ethnicities basically matches the American population. Far from being loners, these people are often contributing members of society who appear normal. Their motives can include anger, hatred of a specific category of people or of society in general, financial gain, and a desire for fame. A killer’s rationale can change or evolve over time.

Certainly, sexual satisfaction is a common motive. Serial killers tend to choose victims who are available and vulnerable, and more than half of the 25 most ferocious modern serial killers hunted—or are still hunting—women and children.

Nevertheless, there are certain traits that repeat. The predator who targets women and children is usually male and tends to come from an abusive background. His father may have been sadistic or overly strict; his mother may have been promiscuous or smothering. In murder, the killer is believed to be retreating from the pain of his boyhood into a world in which he is in control. He is seeking gratification in the violent domination of others, especially of the people who symbolize those who abused him. A serial murderer who targets women may be trying to destroy someone who represents his cruel mother; a child-slayer may be going after those who embody what he despises in himself, especially cracks in his own masculinity.

Gary Leon Ridgway, America’s most voracious serial killer to date, seems to have been motivated in part by a hatred of prostitutes, an insatiable desire for sex, and an obsession with necrophilia. Dubbed the Green River Killer, Ridgway confessed to murdering 71 prostitutes and runaways in Washington State and California in the 1980s and 1990s. He is now serving 48 life sentences plus 480 years without parole. But even Ridgway, a classic serial killer, doesn’t fit neatly into the supposed profile.

“When I read up on serial killers … they always keep stuff,” he told interrogators who asked whether he had kept souvenirs from his victims, “and that’s why I didn’t keep stuff.”

THE BEAST

One of the worst serial killers in history confessed to killing 140 boys in Colombia and Ecuador in the 1990s.

Luis Garavito, a drifter and alcoholic from Colombia, admitted to torturing and murdering 140 boys in a brutal seven-year spree in the 1990s after prosecutors presented overwhelming evidence against him. He was sentenced to 52 years in prison for two of the crimes. One was the killing of a 14-year boy, whose tortured body was found outside Tunja, Colombia in 1996. The other was the attempted rape of another boy in the western city of Villavicencio, the crime that led to Garavito’s arrest in 1999.

The killer was sentenced to the country’s maximum prison term of 60 years, but in a plea bargain, the sentence was reduced to 52 years and six months in exchange for Garavito agreeing not to contest any of the charges against him.

Luis Eduardo Garavito of Colombia confessed to killing 140 children in a five-year nationwide spree.

An engraving of accused killer Gilles de Rais, shown invoking the devil

UNFAIRLY ACCUSED?

Today, some experts suspect there are historical killers who were the victims of sinister plots.

• Gilles de Rais. The wealthy French lord was said to have kidnapped, tortured, and killed hundreds of peasant children from nearby villages. Rais confessed to the crimes and was hanged in 1440. Despite the confession, some modern theorists believe de Rais was the target of a plot—especially since, after his death, his prosecutor was awarded all of his land.

• Gilles Garnier. Called the Werewolf of Dole, this French hermit was blamed for and confessed to the death and mutilation of several children in 1572. Believed to be a werewolf, Garner was burned at the stake. Historians now think he was the innocent scapegoat in a case of witchcraft hysteria.

• Peter Stumpp. A prosperous German farmer, Stumpp was accused of killing and eating 14 victims. Under torture, he confessed and was beheaded in 1589, in a particularly brutal execution. Historians still debate Stumpp’s guilt, with some arguing that he was a victim of political intrigue.

MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO, JACK THE RIPPER TERRORIZED LONDON WITH VICIOUS ACTS. HIS IDENTITY REMAINS UNKNOWN.

There have been many more prolific serial killers than Jack the Ripper, but few have achieved his grisly renown. Between August and November of 1888, the Ripper terrorized the overcrowded, impoverished Whitechapel section of London’s East End, slashing the throats of victims and savagely mutilating their bodies. All of the killer’s victims were women, and all were prostitutes. As the attacks became progressively more violent, they were publicized in London and around the world. The killer was never apprehended, and the case remains one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of all time.

Though some speculate that Jack the Ripper murdered as many as a dozen women, only five are accepted as definitive victims:

MARY ANN “POLLY” NICHOLS, 43. Her body was found on August 31. Her throat was slashed, and there were deep cuts on her abdomen.

ANNIE CHAPMAN, 47. She was severely mutilated and disemboweled on September 8. Her corpse led investigators to suspect that the perpetrator had medical training of some sort.

ELIZABETH “LONG LIZ” STRIDE, 44. She was discovered on September 30. Her throat had been cut, but she was not otherwise violated, leading investigators to think that the killer may have been interrupted.

CATHERINE EDDOWES, 46. Also discovered on September 30. She had been disemboweled and her kidney removed; the autopsy noted that “there was great disfigurement of the face” as well.

MARY JANE KELLY, 25. Found in her bed on November 9, Kelly is believed to have been Jack the Ripper’s last victim.

Scotland Yard photograph of Elizabeth Stride, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims

A portrait of Prince Albert Victor, c. 1890s, one of the people suspected of being Jack the Ripper

Almost from the first Whitechapel murder, theories and suspects abounded. The gruesome nature of the slaying, coupled with the profession of the victims, provided endless fodder for the newspapers, which tried to outdo one another with gory details and outlandish theories. During the fall of 1888, hundreds of letters poured in to the police and the press from people claiming to be the killer. Some were signed “Jack the Ripper,” providing the murderer with his moniker for posterity. Credible suspects included a barber who poisoned three of his wives, an insane Polish Jew who professed hatred of women, and a mentally ill lawyer.

Yet none of Scotland Yard’s efforts led to an arrest, prompting a number of high-profile resignations from the force. The case became the greatest whodunit of all time. To this day, so-called Ripperologists continue to work the angles: Over the years, the Ripper’s crimes have been attributed to Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland; Prince Albert Victor, possibly driven insane from syphilis; and Mary Pearcey, a murderous midwife. In the century-and-a-quarter since he committed his foul acts, Jack the Ripper has been the subject of many articles, books, paintings, films, television shows, graphic novels, and even musicals.

In September 2014, Russell Edwards, an author and amateur sleuth, professed to have conclusively identified Jack the Ripper as Aaron Kosminski, a young Polish immigrant who was committed to an asylum soon after the killings. Although Kosminski has long been a suspect, Edwards claimed to have done DNA testing that proves Kosminski’s guilt. Skeptics were not convinced, and the riddle of the Ripper remains unsolved.

CASE CLOSED?

Novelist Patricia Cornwell is convinced she has figured out the identity of Jack the Ripper.

“I feel that I have cracked it,” best-selling novelist Patricia Cornwell told the London Evening Standard in November 2013. “I believe it’s Sickert, and I believe it now more than ever.”

Cornwell, obsessed with Jack the Ripper for years, first shared her thoughts about the Whitechapel fiend in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed. Others, too, have identified William Sickert, a German-born artist who often depicted London prostitutes in his images, as the perpetrator. But few have gone as far as Cornwell in their sleuthing. She has purchased 32 of Sickert’s works, along with some of his letters and even his writing desk. Her proof of his guilt? Cornwell told the Standard that “confessional and violent” letters sent to the police at the time of the murders were written on paper bearing the same watermark as that used by Sickert. In her interview in the Standard, Cornwell said she will publish her new findings soon.

This illustration shows one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes, and a sketch of a man thought to be implicated in the case.

A VIOLENT ERA

These contemporaries of Jack the Ripper may be less well-known, but their crimes are just as terrifying.

• Starting in the 1860s, Bristol, England, midwife Amelia Dyer took in babies from impoverished unmarried mothers with the understanding that she would find homes for them. Over 30 years, Dyer is believed to have killed as many as 400 infants. Some have speculated that Amelia Dyer and Jack the Ripper were one and the same.

• In 1853, traveling salesman Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Spain’s first known serial killer, confessed to murdering 13 people and using their body fat to make soap. It is now believed that Roma-santa, who was initially raised as a girl, may have suffered from a gender disorder known as pseudohermaphroditism.

• In 1897, drifter Joseph Vacher, who came to be known as the French Ripper, was charged with the strangulation and evisceration of a 17-year-old shepherd boy. Vacher ultimately confessed to killing ten girls and boys and one woman between 1894 and 1897. In some cases, he sexually assaulted and mutilated the bodies.

• Between 1884 and 1908, Norwegian-born Belle Gunness, aka Lady Bluebeard, murdered multiple husbands, children, and several suitors, typically for financial gain. After Gunness’s farmhouse burned to the ground in 1908, the remains of 40 people were exhumed on her property.

THE GHOULISH INSPIRATION FOR ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S CLASSIC FILM WAS A SHY MIDWESTERN FARM BOY.

Waushara County Sheriff Art Schley, left, escorts Ed Gein into Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Milwaukee, 1957.

The house belonging to Ed Gein, where he lived a deceptively quiet life and where parts of his victim’s bodies were found.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 horror film Psycho, creepy Norman Bates runs an isolated motel where guest Marion Crane is murdered as she showers by a knife-wielding old woman. Spoiler alert: The killer turns out to be Bates, dressed up as the domineering mother he had slain years earlier. Bates wasn’t just a figment of Hitchcock’s imagination. The director modeled him on an actual serial killer named Ed Gein.

Born in 1906, Gein grew up on an isolated Plainfield, Wisconsin, farm. His mother, Augusta, kept him busy reading the Bible and doing chores with his brother, Henry. The two were only allowed to leave the house to attend school. Though Augusta was verbally abusive, shy Ed was devoted to her. His father died of alcoholism in 1940, and Henry was killed in a suspicious brush fire on the farm four years later. Some Plainfield residents suspected Ed of murdering his sibling, but no investigation was undertaken.

Gein continued to live with his mother into adulthood, caring for her after two strokes that ultimately led to her death in 1945. He then shut up much of the house, leaving Augusta’s things undisturbed. Known locally as “weird old Eddie,” Gein lived as a reclusive, in just two rooms, and supported himself doing occasional odd jobs. On one occasion, Gein showed some shrunken heads to a young boy who stopped by the house, claiming they came from the South Seas.

In 1957, Gein was identified as the last person to see 50-year-old hardware store owner Bernice Worden before she disappeared. During a search of Gein’s farm, police found Worden’s body in a shed. It was hanging upside down from a beam, slashed open and decapitated. When they entered Gein’s rooms, officers discovered rotting, refrigerated, and preserved human body parts, including at least one head. There were bowls made of human skulls, lampshades and chair seats made of human skin, and trophies and trinkets made of various other body parts. Most chilling of all were the skins of female victims that Gein had removed and sewn together into a “woman suit” that he wore while pretending to be Augusta.

All told, police found the partial remains of ten women on the premises, and Gein confessed to robbing the graves of eight women in the local cemeteries between 1947 and 1952. Police knew that Worden’s body was the ninth, but were uncertain of the identity of the 10th victim. They focused on five unsolved Plainfield-area missing-persons cases dating from 1947 to 1952. Eventually evidence suggested that the unidentified parts belonged to Plainfield tavern keeper Mary Hogan, who had disappeared in the winter of 1954. After an intensive search of Gein’s farm and neighboring land, Gein finally admitted he had killed Hogan.

During a month-long evaluation, Gein was found to be a schizophrenic, a sexual psychopath, and mentally incompetent. As such, he couldn’t be tried for murder and was instead committed to a state hospital. After ten years passed, Gein was reevaluated, declared competent, and in 1968 tried for Worden’s murder. Found guilty, he was sentenced to life in a mental hospital, but was never tried for Hogan’s murder.

Gein died in 1984 at the age of 77, and was buried beside his mother in Plainfield, near the graves he had robbed. His story inspired not only Psycho but also The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.

More than 90 percent of necrophiliacs are men.

A RARE DISORDER

Ed Gein denied having sexual relations with the corpses on his property, but some observers weren’t convinced. What prompts necrophilia?

After studying 122 cases of necrophilia, psychiatrists Jonathan Rosman and Phillip Resnick in 1989 published a paper about the rare disorder in a journal of psychiatry and the law.

• Who are they? 92 percent are male, 79 percent are heterosexual, 50 percent have personality disorders, and 17 percent are psychotic. Their most common occupations are hospital orderly, cemetery worker, and morgue attendant.

• Why do they do it? Sixty-eight percent want a non-resisting and non-rejecting partner, 21 percent want to reunite with a romantic partner, 15 percent are simply sexually attracted to corpses, 15 percent want to alleviate loneliness, and 12 percent want to boost their self-esteem by dominating their murder victims.

• What makes them this way? Common traits include poor self-esteem, fear of rejection, and fantasies of sex with a corpse. Many necrophiliacs had occasion to see or touch corpses at some point.

During his 1979 murder trial in Miami, Florida, Ted Bundy presents a motion before circuit judge Edward Cowart.

But he was such a nice man,” the neighbors sometimes say after the arrest of the killer next door. They’ve been duped by a criminal who, in fact, has no conscience or compassion. He’s manipulative and predatory, but he’s also a chameleon who knows how to play the part of the good—or at least normal—guy. He is often invited willingly into the lives of his victims. Children and women may trust him. But his crimes, premeditated and deliberately cruel, defy understanding.

The most famous American example of the irresistible psychopath is Ted Bundy, who murdered at least 36 women in the 1970s. Why did he do it? According to prison psychologists, Bundy had a deep-seated fear of being humiliated by women. He may have felt wronged by his mother, who bore him out of wedlock and pretended for years that she was his older sister.

Bundy exhibited an early taste for revenge at the University of Washington, where he wooed then dumped a girlfriend who had broken up with him, an event that has been described as pivotal in his psychological development. Yet he fit in seamlessly on campus. A psychology major, Bundy was a high achiever, a snappy dresser, and an emerging leader. He was admitted into two law schools and became active in the Republican Party while working on Governor Daniel J. Evans’s 1973 reelection campaign.

Bundy committed his first confirmed murder in 1974, when he was a 27-year-old law student. Breaking into a Seattle apartment, he beat to death a coed from the University of Washington. He soon dropped out of school and started killing in earnest. Sometimes slipping a fake cast onto his arm or leg, he tricked female college students into helping him with his books or packages; sometimes he posed as a police officer or firefighter. He would kidnap and sexually assault his victims, then beat or strangle them to death.

In 16 months, Bundy killed 17 women in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states, convinced no one would ever see through his handsome facade. But one of his intended victims escaped, and in 1976 her testimony sent him to prison for aggravated kidnapping.

Bundy’s charm continued to serve him when prison psychologists found that he was neither psychotic nor sexually deviant. Prison staff relaxed their guard, and in 1977, facing trial for a 1975 murder, Bundy escaped, ending up in Tallahassee, Florida. There, in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978, he broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University and slaughtered five women in 15 minutes. He was arrested on Valentine’s Day, five days after killing 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, his last victim.

Bundy stood trial for two of the Chi Omega murders in June 1979. Exhibiting characteristic self-confidence, he acted as his own attorney. When the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts and the judge handed down two death sentences, Bundy remained impassive. After receiving a third death sentence for the murder of Leach, he was executed on January 24, 1989. Investigators suspect that he killed at least 100 women.

THE DATING GAME MURDERER

A photographer with a violent past makes an appearance on prime-time TV.

In 1978, a handsome man with thick, dark hair and smiling eyes appeared on the TV show The Dating Game, where unmarried contestants interviewed potential dates from behind a partition. The host introduced the unseen man as a successful photographer who enjoyed skydiving and motorcycling. But once “bachelorette” Cheryl Bradshaw selected the photographer and met him backstage, she changed her mind, finding him “creepy.”

In fact, just a few weeks earlier, Rodney Alcala had been released from prison for raping a 13-year-old girl. After being rejected by Bradshaw, he went on a killing spree, raping and bludgeoning to death a series of women. In all, Alcala was convicted of seven murders, though it is suspected he committed many more.

A 2010 Los Angeles Times profile of Alcala, then 66 years old, described him as a “ brilliant, persuasive serial murderer in the mold of Ted Bundy,” and a “once-dashing ladies’ man [with] a near-genius IQ of 135.” A graduate of the UCLA School of Fine Arts, Alcala had studied with director Roman Polanski.

Rodney Alcala in court in New York, 2013

HANDSOME DEVILS

Multiple studies have shown that physically attractive people are perceived as more likable, trustworthy, and persuasive. Looks worked for these three killers.

• Neville Heath. This dashing British drifter captivated women in the bars of postwar London, brutally killing two of his pickups in 1946. He was convicted before a courtroom full of admiring women, then promptly executed.

• Charles Sobhraj. Sometimes called the Bikini Killer or the Serpent, this murderer of Vietnamese and Indian origins preyed on Western tourists in Asia in the 1970s. He was convicted of one killing and served a seven year sentence.
After Sobhraj was released, he was subsequently sentenced to life for another murder.

• Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Highly intelligent and articulate, Cunanan used his good looks and talent for lying to attract wealthy older men. He killed at least five people in 1997, concluding with fashion designer Gianni Versace. A week later, he committed suicide.

A CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTOR AND COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER LIVED A DOUBLE LIFE AS A SERIAL MURDERER.

In the 1970s, Pogo the Clown was a favorite character at fundraisers and parades in Norwood Park, a tidy Chicago suburb. He was the creation of construction contractor John Wayne Gacy, who volunteered with a civic group. But Gacy troubled some of his acquaintances when, still in full makeup and costume, he would drop into the Good Luck Lounge and throw back a few drinks. Gacy’s neighbors were right to worry.

Born in Chicago in 1942, John Wayne Gacy was shy and awkward throughout his school years and suffered from a minor heart condition that kept him from playing sports. At nine, he was molested by a family friend, and after a playground accident at 11, he began to suffer occasional blackouts. Gacy struggled to fit in at four different high schools, dropped out, ran away briefly, then returned home and graduated from business college in 1963. He soon took a position as a management trainee at the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company.

Gacy married Marilynn Myers in 1964 and the couple settled in Waterloo, Iowa, where Gacy managed his father-in-law’s Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. The Gacys had two children, and from the outside their life looked good.

But John was troubled by his sexual attraction to teenage boys. In 1967, he lured a 15-year-old to his house with promises of porn movies and alcohol, then sexually assaulted him. Other attacks followed, and in 1968 Gacy was arrested and charged on two counts of sodomy. Gacy pled guilty and received a sentence of ten years in prison. Though his life in Waterloo and his marriage were over, Gacy became a model prisoner and was released on parole after 18 months.

In the summer of 1970, 28-year-old Gacy returned to Chicago to start over. He got a job as a cook, and his mother helped him buy a two-bedroom house in Norwood Park. Two years later, he married Carole Hoff. In 1974, he started his own business, PDM Contractors, and began volunteering as a charity clown.

Gacy was soon living a double life. While raping 15-year-old Timothy McCoy in 1972, he committed his first murder. Gacy took his second victim in 1974 and his third in 1975. Over the next three years he assaulted, tortured, and murdered at least 30 more boys—all in his own home. He stashed the bodies in the crawl space under the house.

Despite the disgusting odors, the Gacys entertained friends and family, blaming the smell on humidity. Eventually, Gacy admitted to his wife that he preferred boys to women. She divorced him in 1976 and his spree continued.

On December 11, 1978, after 15-year-old Robert Piest didn’t return from a job interview with Gacy’s firm, Piest’s mother reported him missing. Local police questioned Gacy and let him go, but they continued to monitor him because three other employees of PDM Contractors had disappeared.

The killer seemed unconcerned, even having friendly meals with the police officers tasked with following him. On December 19, he invited two of the detectives into his home, which was filled with a putrid stench. Stressed and jittery, Gacy was arrested.

On December 21, investigators examining the crawl space under his house immediately found human remains. Gacy confessed to Piest’s murder and as many others as he could recall, guessing the number to be at least 45. Although Gacy never claimed that the character Pogo was involved with the murders, the media dubbed Gacy the Killer Clown.

The excavation of Gacy’s property took two months and unearthed 29 bodies, 26 of them in the crawl space. The youngest victim was nine years old and the oldest in his mid-20s.

At his trial in early 1980, Gacy pled not guilty by reason of insanity. Gacy received 12 death sentences and 21 life sentences, and was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.

Two members of the hip-hop group Insane Clown Posse, whose fans pretend to be obsessed with murder.

FEAR FACTOR

The creepy case of John Wayne Gacy made the killer clown a pop culture icon.

• Insane Clown Posse. Recording since 1992, this “horrorcore” hip-hop group performs in clown makeup and incorporates circus imagery into their concerts. Devoted fans called Juggalos wear clown makeup and affect an obsession with murder.

• It. Stephen King’s novel was the basis for a 1990 television miniseries of the same title. The villain is a clown with sharp fangs and claws who lives in the sewers and preys on children.

• Killer Klowns from Outer Space. This 1988 cult favorite features aliens dressed as clowns who collect humans by encasing them in cotton-candy cocoons, then transport their catch to the home planet.

THE CLUB SCENE OF THE 1970S AND 80S WAS AN ENDLESS PARTY—BUT SINGLES HANGOUTS COULD BE DEADLY.

Richard Gere sits with Diane Keaton at a bar in a scene from the film Looking For Mr. Goodbar, 1977.

One of the most controversial novels of the 1970s, Judith Rossner’s best-selling Looking for Mr. Goodbar caused a stir when it was published in 1975 and a bigger one when the film based on it was released in 1977. The story explored the double life of a repressed schoolteacher, Theresa Dunn: During the day, Dunn works with deaf children, but by night she frequents New York City singles bars, cruising for casual rough-sex partners. It can’t end well, and it doesn’t.

Though Dunn’s character is complicated—she wants a liberated life but she’s self-destructive and has father issues—the film was largely interpreted as a cautionary tale: Engaging in promiscuous behavior with strangers can be deadly. Based on real-life events, Looking for Mr. Goodbar terrified a generation raised on the ideal of free love. For many, the party was over, at least for a little while.

In early January 1973, 28-year-old RoseAnn Quinn didn’t show up for work one morning at the St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Children in the Bronx. Concerned, a colleague went to her apartment, where she and the building superintendent discovered Quinn’s blood-covered body. She had been stabbed repeatedly, and evidence of sexual activity was found on the body. In the New York Daily News, a neighbor described Quinn as “very nice and quiet and shy. She wore skirts and blouses, not this hippie stuff.” Neighbors also noted that she was “the type of girl who would have a guy in if he brought her home,” and indicated delicately that from what they’d heard, she may have enjoyed rough sex. A few days after Quinn’s body was found, police apprehended a 23-year-old drifter named John Wayne Wilson. He soon confessed that he had met Quinn in a singles bar and gone home with her. He became enraged when she insulted him, and murdered her. Wilson was diagnosed as severely mentally ill, and committed suicide while awaiting trial.

The straight, single women of New York weren’t the only ones thinking twice about their dating habits in the 1970s. Between 1974 and September 1975, 14 gay men in San Francisco were murdered by a serial killer nicknamed “the Doodler.” He cruised gay bars to find victims and would draw sketches of them to break the ice. Once he got them alone, he’d stab them to death. The Doodler didn’t have a type: His victims included drag queens, leather-bar denizens, businessmen, and lawyers. At one point, the police were fairly certain they had identified the killer, but two men who survived attacks were reluctant to cooperate. They were worried about testifying in court, not wanting to admit publicly that they were gay. The Doodler was never caught.

Filmmaker William Friedkin, center, tries to elude reporters, 1979.

OUTRAGED REACTION

A film about the gay club scene is attacked as homophobic.

Director William Friedkin’s sexually explicit movie Cruising, based on a novel by the same name and inspired by true events, was largely panned by reviewers when it was released in 1980. But the story, about a cop played by Al Pacino, also caused outrage within the gay community. Protestors objected to the plot, which followed Pacino as he went undercover to infiltrate Manhattan’s gay S&M scene to track down a serial killer. It was criticized as homophobic and exploitative, equating homosexuals with depravity and criminal behavior.

Serial killer Glen Rogers after being captured, 1995

LETHAL BARFLIES

Lounges have long served as hunting grounds for serial killers.

Serial killers seek their prey in all corners, but taverns were especially popular with these three pickup artists.

• Glen Rogers, aka the Casanova Killer, was a blue-eyed smooth talker who picked up blondes and redheads in bars, persuaded them to drive him home, then stabbed or strangled them. He has been sentenced to death in two separate trials.

• George Russell, “the Bellevue Yuppie Murderer,” was an attractive young man who frequented the yuppie nightclubs of Bellevue, Washington, in the summer of 1990. Russell’s crimes were notable for their savagery and for the degrading ways he posed the corpses. He was convicted on three charges of first-degree murder.

• Michael Lupo, a flower shop manager in London, cruised the city’s homosexual bars in 1986. Having contracted the HIV virus, Lupo was on a campaign to exact revenge against the gay population. He strangled four men and attempted to murder two others before he was apprehended. Lupo died in prison in 1995 while serving four life sentences.

WHEN RUSSIA’S FIRST KNOWN SERIAL KILLER WAS APPREHENDED AFTER A 12-YEAR MURDER SPREE, HE ANNOUNCED, “I WAS A MISTAKE OF NATURE.”

Andrei Chikatilo, who was found guilty on 52 counts of murder, is seen here before his 1992 trial.

It was a frigid December 1978 in Shakhty, a coal-mining town in southern Russia, when a clean-shaven, neatly dressed man in his 40s invited nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova into a cabin. The man promised to let Yelena use the bathroom, but once he got the young girl inside he raped, strangled, and stabbed her to death. He then threw Yelena’s body into a nearby river.

So began the sadistic career of Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. Over the next 12 years Chikatilo would sexually assault, murder, and mutilate at least 14 girls, 21 boys, and 18 women, before being stopped by the police.

Born in 1936 in famine-ravaged Ukraine, Chikatilo as a child was beaten by his mother and bullied by his schoolmates. When he began having sex at age 15, he found satisfaction only when the girl struggled. Nevertheless, Chikatilo married in 1963 and later fathered two children. He became a schoolteacher in 1971, and although he was repeatedly accused of molesting his students, he was never fired. In 1978, Chikatilo took a new teaching position and moved to Shakhty.

In September, 1981, almost three years after murdering Yelena Zakotnova, Chikatilo struck again. This time his victim was a 17-year-old boarding school student Larisa Tkachenko, whom he lured into the woods to drink vodka, then raped and killed. He started prowling bus and railway stations for schoolchildren, prostitutes, and the homeless. After enticing his prey to secluded spots with offers of food, alcohol, or help, Chikatilo would sexually assault, stab, and sometimes strangle and mutilate them. When he was finished, he made little effort to hide the bodies.

Even as Chikatilo’s murderous tally rose, Soviet authorities were reluctant to admit there might be a serial killer at large. But by 1982, police had linked six of 17 murder victims to a single killer, and a profile began to emerge. The media, transfixed by the ghoulish details, stepped up its coverage of the case and dubbed the unidentified butcher the “Rostov Ripper,” after the Rostov district, where many of the slayings took place.

Chikatilo’s most savage year was 1984, when he took the lives of 15 people, ranging from a ten-year-old boy to a 45-year-old woman. Eyewitnesses began to come forward, and the police found some physical evidence, including semen that pegged the killer’s blood type as the rare AB. In September, a plainclothes police officer noticed a man fitting the killer’s description at a bus station and arrested Chikatilo. Though a knife and rope were found in Chikatilo’s briefcase, lab tests showed that the suspect’s blood type was A, and he was allowed to go.

For a period, Chikatilo seemed to withdraw. By early summer 1986, only two other murders fitting Chikatilo’s signature had been recorded and authorities feared the trail was running cold.

Chikatilo resumed killing in August 1986, when he took the life of an 18-year-old girl. In 1987, he murdered three teenage boys, then another two boys and a young woman in 1988. In 1989 he killed five times, and in 1990, eight. His final known victim was 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik, murdered on November 6, 1990, in a forested area near the Donleskhoz station.

As Chikatilo emerged from the woods, he was spotted by an undercover policeman and soon apprehended for suspicious behavior. Yet again, Chikatilo was seemingly exonerated by his blood test, which showed him to be an A, not the incriminating AB. When the Rostov police learned that there were extremely unusual cases in which men could have different blood and semen types, they tested Chikatilo’s semen. It was AB.

Chikatilo quickly admitted to 34 of the 36 murders attributed to the Rostov Ripper and described them in detail. He then surprised the police by confessing to 22 more unsolved homicides and leading them to the crime scenes. The prosecutor charged Chikatilo with 53 of the 56 slayings he described, and psychiatrists found him competent to stand trial.

During the 1992 proceedings, Chikatilo was confined to a cage in the courtroom. Sometimes refusing to answer questions, sometimes shouting, singing, or exposing himself, he was suspected of attempting to fake insanity—but if that was the case, it did little to help him. He was found guilty on 52 counts of murder, sentenced to death, and executed by a gunshot to the head on Valentine’s Day, 1994.

Andrei Chikatilo languishes in a cell after his conviction.

OTHER VICTIMS

Before the real Rostov Ripper was apprehended, several men paid for his crimes.

Chikatilo not only murdered 52 women and children, he also caused the deaths of others suspected of the killings.

• 1978 A young laborer, Aleksandr Kravchencko, was arrested after Chikatilo’s first murder. Kravchencko had only one arrest on his record, for vandalism. But as the case progressed, he lost hope and confessed. He was found guilty and was executed.

• 1982 A former sex offender arrested for one of the murders hanged himself rather than face interrogation and trial.

• Late 80s Three gay suspects in the slayings committed suicide.

THE DIGITAL AGE HAS MADE LIFE EASIER FOR JUST ABOUT EVERYONE, INCLUDING WOULD-BE MURDERERS.

A detail of a bulletin board created by police officials that features photographs of Philip Markoff, who targeted women he met through the website Craigslist.

Back in the 1970s, when the internet was emerging, not even the most visionary minds could have predicted the ways in which our lives would be transformed. Today, users take for granted all of the things the web offers, whether buying or selling things, paying bills, playing games, or making friends. But the online world, with its thin promise of anonymity, also presents opportunities for predators, pedophiles, scammers, and even murderers.

One of the many liberating wonders of the internet is how it allows users to speak freely in web forums and chat rooms without fear of recourse. But that same feature provides cover for some depraved, mentally ill, and criminal members of society. Amateurs can pretend to be authorities, pedophiles can pose as teenagers, and people claiming to look for kinky sex can actually be looking for someone to murder.

In the 1990s, John Edward Robinson used the nickname “the Slavemaster” in the sadomasochistic chat rooms he trolled, ostensibly seeking women to play submissive roles during sex. A convicted embezzler, Robinson would meet and develop relationships with the women, who would then disappear. Eventually Robinson’s name began to appear in missing persons investigations, and he was was convicted of murdering three women in Kansas and Missouri. Today, Robinson is called “the internet’s first serial killer.”

Alternatively, online criminals seek their prey in innocuous places, such as chat rooms for animal lovers. In 2004, 36-year-old Lisa Montgomery used a fake name when she made contact with 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in an online forum devoted to rat terriers. On December 16, Montgomery strangled the eight-months-pregnant Stinnett in her Missouri home, cut the unborn baby out of her womb, and showed off the child as her own.

One site that has won notoriety for allegedly enabling criminals to connect with unsuspecting victims is the classified advertisement website Craigslist. The site is operated as a sort of bulletin board where users are allowed to post information. After a number of homicides in which perpetrators met their victims through the classified site, the media coined the phrase “Craigslist Killers.”

Philip Markoff, for example, was a clean-cut, 22-year-old Boston University medical student who frequented the erotic services section of Craigslist. In April of 2009, Markoff answered an ad for massage services posted by 26-year-old Julissa Brisman, and the two arranged a meeting at Boston’s Copley Marriott. When Brisman was discovered at the hotel, she was bound and unconscious, with multiple gunshot wounds; she died later that night. Police investigating the case soon linked Markoff though an earlier assault on an erotic dancer he also had met on Craigslist. Markoff was arrested and charged with murder and robbery, but committed suicide in jail before he could be tried. (The erotic services section of Craigslist has since been discontinued.)

Self-proclaimed Satanists Miranda Barbour, 19, and Elytte Barbour, 22, were newlyweds when Miranda placed an ad on Craigslist looking for “companionship” in exchange for $100. Troy LaFerrara, 42, of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, responded to the posting and agreed to meet Miranda in a parking lot. According to Miranda, the original plan was for Elytte, who was hiding under a blanket in the backseat of their car, to kill Ferrara. Instead, Miranda did it herself, stabbing her victim 20 times. The two have pleaded guilty to murder. Elytte told police that they slew LaFerrara because they wanted to take someone’s life together.

Murderer Richard Beasley received the death penalty; his accomplice was sentenced to life in prison.

COLD BLOODED

Three men who responded to online help-wanted listings ended up dead.

In 2011, 52-year-old Richard Beasley and 16-year-old Brogan Rafferty placed an ad offering $300 a week and a free trailer to “watch over a 688-acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a few cows” in Ohio. Beasley and Rafferty murdered three men who responded to the ad. Both were convicted.

Raymond Martinez Fernandez found his victims through personal ads.

TARGETING SINGLE WOMEN

In the pre-digital era, one killer sought out the vulnerable through Lonely Hearts Club ads.

Before the era of dating sites, single men and women seeking companionship often turned to personal ads. For Raymond Martinez Fernandez, a former merchant marine, this was an opportunity. In the 1940s, Fernandez began responding to so-called Lonely Hearts Club listings, finding vulnerable women, building their trust, then robbing them.

He met Martha Beck this way, but instead of robbing her, Fernandez enlisted her as an accomplice. Beck soon became so jealous of the attention Fernandez gave their targets that the pair turned to murder. It wasn’t until February 1949, after murdering as many as 20 victims, that Fernandez and Beck were caught. They signed a lengthy confession, were tried, and were sentenced to death.

FOR WOMEN WITH A PECULIAR PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDER, CONVICTED MEN HAVE A SPECIAL APPEAL.

Testimonial letters from pen pals who met through a website WriteAPrisoner.com, which helps inmates receive letters from correspondents

If most of us found out a potential love interest had a criminal record, we would probably think twice about getting involved. So what explains the attraction so many women have for convicted felons they have never met?

Consider Scott Peterson, the adulterous husband convicted in 1995 of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci. No sooner had he settled in on death row at San Quentin Penitentiary than Peterson began to get fan letters, phone calls, and even marriage proposals. Or Drew Peterson (no relation), convicted in 2012 of the murder of his third wife and suspected in the disappearance of his fourth, whose attorney said he received a “truckload” of mail from women while he was on trial.

It’s sometimes called Bonnie and Clyde syndrome, but the clinical term for the attraction some people have for violent criminals is hybristophilia. Though research on this psychological disorder is limited, more women seem to have it than men. In profound cases, a hybristophiliac might end up a co-conspirator in her paramour’s crimes. The so-called prison groupies who develop crushes on high-profile killers are said to have a lesser form of the condition.

Experts suggest a number of reasons that women fall for felons. Some are simply attracted to famous men, and a love letter to a prisoner is much more likely to get a response than one to a movie star. Other women may sincerely believe that the object of their affections is innocent, or may want to save him. Women who communicate with prisoners often suffer from low self-esteem and may have suffered sexual or physical abuse; they see a relationship with an incarcerated criminal as perversely safe, because the criminal is behind bars and can never get out.

If you are wondering how they manage to initiate contact, it’s fairly easy to get in touch with any incarcerated person. Government databases, accessible via the internet, list the location of many inmates, and websites such as WriteAPrisoner.com facilitate email correspondence between those in the outside world and those behind bars. Prisoners do not have access to the internet, so WriteAPrisoner.com prints out the emails it receives and forwards them to the addressees, who reply via regular mail.

It’s not particularly difficult to marry a convict, either: The prisoner must request a marriage packet, and the bride- or groom-to-be on the outside must provide proof of citizenship and legal age. Though conjugal visits aren’t allowed in federal prison, a few states allow them in medium or minimum-security facilities.

A CONTROVERSIAL REQUEST

The internet helps some criminals connect with pen pals. Others have no such luck.

In 2003, Susan Smith, convicted eight years earlier of drowning her two sons, posted the following profile on WriteAPrisoner.com. It garnered so much negative media attention that Smith asked that it be taken down a few weeks later:

“I am 31 years old. My birthday is September 26. I am looking to meet new people and, hopefully, become friends. During my spare time, I enjoy reading, working puzzles, and writing. I love rainbows, Mickey Mouse, the beach, the mountains, and waterfalls. My favorite color is navy blue and my favorite flower is the daisy. I am a Christian and I enjoy attending church. I consider myself to be sensitive, caring, and kind-hearted. I’m currently serving a life sentence on the charge of murder. I have grown and matured alot since my incarceration, but I will always hurt for the pain I’ve caused so many, especially my children. I hope to receive letters from those who are not judgmental and who are sincere. I look forward to hearing from new people and, hopefully, finding new friends. May God bless each one of you!”

Susan Smith during a preliminary hearing, 1995

Manson cult member Susan Atkins, left, with her husband, attorney James Whitehouse

ISN’T IT ROMANTIC?

Their inhuman deeds didn’t stop them from finding love—or what passes for it—behind bars.

• “Bolin the Butcher.” Oscar Ray Bolin was on death row in Florida for raping, beating, and stabbing three young women, but when Rosalie Martinez, a social worker, met him in 1995, she was so bewitched that she gave up a wealthy husband and four daughters to marry him. They made it legal over the telephone in 1996.

• Susan Atkins. This Manson Family murderess and eventual born-again Christian scored not one but two husbands while in the slammer. In 1981 she wed Donald Lee Laisure, a Texan who claimed to be a multimillionaire and spelled his name “Lai$ure.” The marriage lasted a few months. In 1987 she married James Whitehouse, 15 years her junior. That one stuck: The two remained a couple until Atkins’s death from brain cancer in 2009.

• The Hillside Stranglers. Cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr. raped and murdered ten women and girls in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The duo was imprisoned for life, but each found a bride. In 1986 Buono married Christine Kizuka, a government employee. In 1989 Bianchi married Shirlee Book, a Louisiana woman who had corresponded with a number of convicts and had reportedly been rejected by Ted Bundy.