The 1970s was the era in which the general public suddenly became conscious of the problem of the serial killer. This was due mainly to six cases, five American, one British. In four out of five of the American cases, the murders reached double figures. It seemed that violence in the late twentieth century was spiralling out of control—and that, moreover, the killers were becoming increasing sadistic. At least the Boston Strangler and Jerry Brudos had simply murdered and raped their victims; Dean Corll and the Hillside Stranglers also tortured theirs. All this caused a shock impact not unlike that of the Jack the Ripper murders on the Victorians.
Dean Corll, a homosexual who was still attached to his teddy bear, was the first serial killer to create this feeling that human depravity had reached new depths.
Shortly after 8 a.m. on 8 August 1973, the telephone operator in the Pasadena Police Department received a call from someone with a boyish voice and a broad Texas accent. ‘Y’all better come on here now. Ah jes’ killed a man.’ He gave the address as 2020 Lamar Drive.
Within a minute, two squad cars were on their way. Lamar Drive was in a middle-class suburb of Pasadena—a south-eastern suburb of Houston—and 2020 Lamar was a small frame bungalow with an overgrown lawn. Three teenagers were sitting on the stoop by the front door: two boys and a girl. The girl, who was small and shapely, was dressed in clothes that looked even more tattered than the usual teenage outfit. All three were red-eyed, as if they had been crying. A skinny, pimply youth with an incipient blonde moustache identified himself as the one who had made the phone call. He pointed at the front door: ‘He’s in there.’
Lying against the wall in the corridor was the naked body of a well-built man, his face caked with blood that had flowed from a bullet wound. There were more bullet holes in his back and shoulder. The bullet in the head had failed to penetrate fully, and the end was sticking out of his skull. He was very obviously dead.
The three teenagers had identified themselves as Elmer Wayne Henley, 17, Timothy Kerley, 16, and Rhonda Williams, 15. Henley, the youth who had made the call, also acknowledged that he had shot his friend, whose name was Dean Arnold Corll. The teenagers were driven off to the Pasadena police headquarters. Meanwhile, an ambulance was summoned to take the corpse to the morgue, and detectives began to search the house.
It was obvious that Corll had moved in recently—the place was only half furnished. The bedroom outside which the corpse was lying contained only a single bed and a small table. It smelt strongly of acrylic paint—the type used in ‘glue-sniffing’. The oddest thing about the room was the transparent plastic sheeting that covered the whole carpet. And lying beside the bed was an eight-foot length of plywood with handcuffs attached to two of its corners, and nylon ropes to the other two. A long hunting knife in its scabbard lay nearby. A black box proved to contain a seventeen-inch dildo—an imitation male sexual organ—and a tube of vaseline. It did not require the powers of a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that these objects were connected with some bizarre sexual ritual in which the victims were unwilling.
The new Ford van parked in the drive produced the same impression. There were navy blue curtains that could be drawn to seal off the whole of the rear portion, a piece of carpeting on the floor, and rings and hooks attached to the walls. There was also a considerable length of nylon rope. In a large box—covered with a piece of carpet—there were strands of human hair. Another similar box in a shed had air-holes drilled in its sides.
Back at the police station, Elmer Wayne Henley was explaining how he came to shoot his friend Dean Corll. He was nervous, and chain-smoked as he made his statement.
He had met Corll, he said, when he had lived in a run-down area of Houston called the Heights. Corll, who was sixteen years his senior, had recently moved into a house that had belonged to his father; it was in Pasadena. On the previous night, he and Timothy Kerley had gone to a glue-sniffing party at Corll’s house. But in the early hours of the morning, the two boys had made some excuse to go out and collect Rhonda Williams, who had just decided to run away from home. Rhonda had been in a state of tension and misery ever since her boyfriend had vanished a year ago.
Corll had been furious when the boys arrived back at the house with Rhonda. ‘You weren’t supposed to bring a girl,’ he yelled, ‘You spoilt everything.’ But after a while he seemed to control himself and regain his good humour, and the four of them settled down to glue-sniffing in the living room. Acrylic paint was sprayed into a paper bag, which was then passed around so they could all breathe in the fumes. Within an hour, they were all stretched out unconscious on the floor.
When Wayne Henley woke up, daylight was filtering through the drawn curtains, and Corll was snapping handcuffs on his wrists; his ankles were tied together. The other two were already handcuffed and bound. As they all began to recover their senses and struggle against their bonds, Corll revealed that his good humour of a few hours ago had been deceptive. He was seething with resentment and fury. He waved the knife at them and told them he was going to kill them all. ‘But first I’m gonna have my fun.’ Then he dragged Henley into the kitchen and rammed a revolver in his belly.
Henley decided that his only chance of escape was to ‘sweet talk’ Corll, persuading him that he would be willing to join in the murder of the other two. It took some time, but finally Corll calmed down and removed the handcuffs. Henley would rape Rhonda while he raped Timothy Kerley. Corll went and picked up Kerley, carrying him to the bedroom like some huge spider. Then he came back and carried off Rhonda. He turned on the portable radio to its top volume to drown any screams or protests.
When Henley went into the bedroom, Corll was naked, and was handcuffing Kerley, who was also naked, to the plywood board. Kerley, like Rhonda, was gagged. Corll handed Henley the knife and ordered him to cut off Rhonda’s clothes. Rhonda was still dazed from the glue-sniffing, and was only half-aware of what was happening. But Kerley understood, and struggled violently as Corll tried to sexually assault him.
Knowing he was under observation, Henley pretended to rape Rhonda; in fact, he was incapable. But as Kerley thrashed and struggled violently, trying to throw off the heavy man, Henley shouted above the music: ‘Why don’t you let me take her outa here? She don’t want to see that.’ Corll ignored him. Henley jumped to his feet and grabbed the .22 pistol from the night table. ‘Back off, Dean! Stop it!’ Corll lurched to his feet. ‘Go on Wayne, kill me. Why don’t you?’ As he lurched towards Henley, the boy fired; the bullet struck Corll in the head, and he staggered past, while Henley fired another shot into his shoulder. As Corll fell through the door and hit the wall of the corridor, Henley emptied the rest of the bullets into his back. Corll slumped down slowly to the floor, resting finally with his cheek and shoulder against the wall.
Henley quickly found the handcuff key and released the two teenagers—Rhonda was still unable to take in what had happened. But when she saw Corll lying in a pool of blood, she began to scream. Henley calmed her, and the three of them dressed—Rhonda making do with her slashed clothes. They discussed what to do next—whether to simply leave the corpse and go away. But it would be found sooner or later, and if neighbours had seen them entering or leaving the house, they would be in serious trouble. So Henley looked up the number of the Pasadena police department and rang them. As the tension relaxed, all three of them found they were unable to stop sobbing.
It took Henley an hour and a half to make his statement. Meanwhile, Kerley was able to confirm the story. But Kerley also mentioned something that intrigued the detectives. ‘While we were waiting for the police, Wayne told me that if I wasn’t his friend, he could have got fifteen hundred dollars for me.’
Questioned about the plywood board and the dildo, Henley told the police that Corll liked little boys, and had been paying him to procure them for him. But why, in that case, had Henley decided to kill him? ‘He made one mistake’, said Henley, ‘He told me that I wouldn’t be the first one he’d killed. He said he’d already killed a lot of boys and buried them in the boat shed.’
The words made the detectives glance at one another. So far, they had been assuming that this was a simple case of glue-sniffing and sexual perversion, and that Corll’s threats to kill the teenagers had been intended to frighten them. Henley’s words raised a far more unpleasant suspicion. For nearly three years now, boys had been disappearing in the Heights area of Houston. Some were assumed to be runaways, but in the case of many of them, the parents had ruled it out as impossible—as, for example, in the case of a 9-year-old boy. Now the police had learned that Corll had lived in the Heights area until he moved to Pasadena, and one of his homes had been directly opposite that of the missing 9-year-old…
‘Where is this boat shed?’
Henley said he wasn’t sure; he had been there only once. But it was somewhere in south-west Houston. And now he was able to recollect three of the names that Corll had mentioned: Marty Jones, someone called Cobble, and someone called Hilligiest.
Even now, none of the detectives really believed they were dealing with mass murder. It was more likely that Henley was still under the influence of the ‘glue’. But it had to be checked.
Detective Sergeant Dave Mullican asked Henley: ‘Can you remember how to get to this boat shed?’
‘I think so. It’s near Hiram Clark Road.’
The first stop was the Houston police headquarters. There Henley was shown pictures of two boys who had been missing since 27 July, thirteen days ago. Henley identified them as Charles Cobble, 17, and Marty Jones, 18. The teenagers had shared a room, and both had good school records. Neither had any reason to run away.
The Pasadena detectives—accompanied by two of their Houston colleagues—now headed south to Hiram Clark Road. Another group of detectives were ordered to collect spades and ropes, and to meet them there. It was already late afternoon when the two cars arrived at the rendezvous, and Henley now took over the navigating. This was an area of open fields with cattle grazing in them. Finally, they pulled up beside a barbed wire fence on Silver Bell Street, and Henley pointed out the corrugated iron shed standing well back from the road.
Southwest Boat Storage was virtually a car park for boats, with twenty roofed ‘stalls’. The police cars drove into the compound, and Henley directed them to stall number eleven. ‘That’s Dean’s.’
The double doors were padlocked, and the lady who lived in a large house next to the compound—a Mrs Mayme Meynier—told them she had no key: the renters provided their own padlock. When they explained that Dean Corll was dead, she gave them permission to break in.
There was no boat inside: only a half-dismantled car, a bicycle and a large iron drum. The place was like an oven. There were also some cardboard boxes, water containers, and—ominously—two sacks of lime. The earthen floor was covered by two long strips of old carpet. A large plastic bag proved to contain a mixed lot of male clothing, including a pair of red shoes.
Wayne Henley stood at the door, looking inside. Then he walked back towards the cars, sat down on the ground, and buried his head between his knees.
The first task was to move everything out of the shed. While this was being done, a detective noted the registration numbers on the car and the bicycle and radioed them to headquarters. The answer came back quickly: the car had been stolen from a used car lot, and the bicycle belonged to a 13-year-old boy named James Dreymala who had vanished less than a week ago.
Now the place had been emptied, the two strips of carpet were also rolled out. Mullican pointed to a swelling in the floor near the left wall, and told two ‘trusties’—convicts from the local jail who had been brought along to help—to start digging.
Even with the doors open, the heat was still stifling. Both men were soon perspiring heavily. Six inches down in the sandy earth, they uncovered a white substance.
‘That’s lime,’ said Mullican, ‘Keep digging.’
Suddenly, the shed was filled with a sickening stench; the detectives held their noses. The next carefully excavated shovelful revealed a face looking up at them. The younger trusty dropped his spade and rushed outside, making retching noises. A policeman took up the spade and went on clearing the earth. Minutes later, the policemen found themselves looking down at a large plastic bag that contained the body of a boy. He looked about 12 or 13, and was naked. When the bag had been carefully lifted from the ground, it was obvious that the body inside had been recently buried. One of the detectives radioed headquarters to send forensic experts.
Outside, the press was starting to arrive. One radio reporter had allowed Wayne Henley to use his car telephone to call up his mother. They heard him say: ‘Mama, I killed Dean.’ Over his own microphone the reporter heard Mrs Henley said: ‘Oh Wayne, you didn’t!’ From what followed, it was clear that Henley’s mother wanted to rush out to the site; a detective shook his head.
Moments later, as Henley hung up, the body was carried out from the boat shed in its plastic sheeting. The boy was clearly shaken. ‘It was all my fault.’ ‘Why?’ asked a detective casually. ‘Because I introduced him to them boys.’ And the teenager went on to explain that, during the past two years, he had procured many boys for Dean Corll.
By the time the radio reporter went on the air at six o’clock, a second body had just been discovered. As it began to grow dark, a fire engine with a floodlight and two air-extractors arrived. Soon after that, two more bodies were uncovered. One had been shot in the head, the other strangled with a Venetian blind cord that was still knotted tight around the throat. As the news of the finds was broadcast, crowds of spectators arrived to stare over the barbed wire fence. The air extractors blasted the smell of decaying corpses at them. One reporter had already minted a striking phrase: ‘There are wall to wall bodies in there.’
Mrs Meynier, the owner of the site, was being questioned about her former tenant. She described him as ‘the nicest person you’d ever meet’, a ‘gentleman’ with a charming smile and dimples. He had never been behind with his $5 a week rent. But recently, she had been baffled when he told her he wanted to rent another stall. Why should he need more space? Surely he already had plenty?
Asked how long Corll had rented the stall, she replied: ‘Since 1971.’ The detective turned away muttering: ‘My God!’
Henley, meanwhile, was also telling reporters how nice Corll could be. His mother liked ‘ol’ Dean’ and did not object to their friendship. But as the fourth body was carried out, he became nervous; it was obvious that he was suffering from a glue-sniffing hangover. At ten o’clock he was driven back to the police station. Two hours later, the body count had risen to eight, and the diggers were exhausted. They decided to call it a day.
Back in the Heights, many families with missing teenage sons were now watching their television screens for the printed messages that gave the latest news, and trying to convince themselves that their child could not be among those in the boat shed. But for those whose children had known Dean Corll, that was a slender hope. Now the parents found themselves wondering why they had failed to suspect Corll of being a sexual pervert. He and his mother had run a candy factory in the Heights, and Corll was popular with the children because he gave them candy. He also gave them lifts in his white Dodge van.
By midnight, a planeload of reporters from other parts of the country arrived in Houston. And from all over the world, reporters were converging on the corrugated iron boat shed. Dean Corll had been dead for only sixteen hours, but his name had already readied every part of the globe. If the number of his suspected victims was confirmed—and the detectives had a list of forty-two youngsters who had vanished since 1970—he would be America’s worst mass murderer to date. Even H. H. Holmes had only confessed to twenty-eight.
Two hours after the lights went out at Southwest Boat Storage on Silver Bell Street, a car containing five people drew up at the barbed wire fence. They identified themselves to the police on guard as the Hilligiest family. Thirteen-year-old David Hilligiest had disappeared more than two years earlier, on 30 May 1971. He had set out for the local swimming pool early that afternoon, and failed to arrive there. On that same day, another local boy, George Malley Winkle, 16, had vanished. The Hilligiests had spent eleven hundred dollars on a private detective, but had failed to find the slightest trace of their son. Now, after telephoning police headquarters, they had learned that Wayne Henley had mentioned David Hilligiest as one of the victims buried in the boat stall. They begged the police guard to allow them to go to the boat stall. The police explained sympathetically that that was impossible; the lights were out and the place was now locked up. They had better go home, get some sleep, and prepare for their ordeal of the next day.
At ten the next morning, after a visit from his mother and a light breakfast, Henley was again sitting opposite Mullican in the Pasadena interrogation room. The rings under his eyes made it obvious that he had slept badly.
‘Tell me about the boys you procured.’
Henley explained that he had met Corll two years earlier, and that Corll had then offered him $200 each for any boys he could ‘bring along’. For a year he did nothing; then, when he badly needed money, decided to take up the offer. Corll had not actually paid him the full $200 for the first boy he had procured. And he had not paid subsequently.
Now Henley made his most significant admission so far: that he had been present when Corll had killed some of the boys. This suddenly changed the whole situation. The police had been assuming that they were dealing with an insatiable homosexual rapist and a youth he had persuaded to help him find boys. Now it began to look as if Wayne Henley had been an active partner in the murders.
They were interrupted by the telephone. It was the Houston police headquarters. A man named Alton Brooks had turned up at the police station with his 18-year-old son David, explaining that David had known Corll and wanted to talk about it. And David Brooks was now giving a statement that implicated Henley in the murders.
When Mullican hung up, he told teenager on the other side of the desk: ‘That was Lieutenant Porter at Houston Homicide. He says he has a boy named David Brooks in there, and Brooks is making a statement about you and Dean Corll.’
Oddly enough, Henley looked relieved.
‘That’s good. Now I can tell you the whole story.’
Mullican’s next question was: ‘Did you kill any of the boys yourself?’
Henley answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, sir.’
Mullican did his best to show no emotion during the statement that followed. But it was difficult to look impassive. What Henley was describing was how he had lured some of his own best friends into Corll’s lair, witnessed their torture and rape, and then participated in their murders.
It seemed that David Brooks had been Corll’s original accomplice, as well as his lover. He had been procuring victims for Corll long before Henley came along. In fact, Henley was intended to be just another victim when he was taken along to meet Corll in 1971. But Corll soon realized that Henley would be more useful as an accomplice. He had a lot of friends, and would do anything for money. In fact, said Henley, he was pretty sure that Corll still planned to kill him sooner or later, because he had his eye on Henley’s 14-year-old brother Ronnie, and knew he would have to kill Wayne before he could get his hands on Ronnie…
The method of obtaining victims was usually much the same. Corll would drive around with Henley until they saw a likely victim, and Corll would offer him a lift. Since there was already a teenager in the car, the boy would suspect nothing. That was how Dean had picked up that 13-year-old blond kid a few days ago. Dean was parked in front of a grocery store when the kid came past on his bike. Dean called him over and told him he had found some Coke bottles in his van, and the kid could go and collect the deposit on them. The boy (it was 13-year-old James Dreymala) took the bottles and came back a few minutes later with the money. Then Dean remembered that he had a lot more Coke bottles back in his garage, and if the kid would like to come along, he could have them. So James Dreymala allowed Dean to put his bike in the back of the van, and went back to Dean’s house on Lamar Street. The boy said he had to ring his father to ask if he could stay out, but the father refused. After the call, Dean ‘had his fun’, then strangled the boy, taking the body out to the boat shed to join the others…
At about this time, Mullican heard the latest report from the boat shed. Four more victims had been found in the past two hours, bringing the total up to twelve. And beside one of them his genitals had been found in a plastic bag. Part of Dean’s ‘fun’ was castrating his victims.
Henley’s new confession went on for two more hours. It was rambling and often incoherent, but Mullican gathered that Henley had been present at the murder of at least nine boys. He admitted shooting one of them himself. The bullet had gone up his nose, and the boy had looked up and said: ‘Wayne, why did you shoot me?’ Henley pointed the gun at the boy’s head and pulled the trigger again; this time the boy died.
Had Corll buried any bodies in other places beside the boat shed? Mullican wanted to know. Oh sure, said Henley, there were some on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn, and more on High Island Beach, east of Galveston…
It was now past noon, but it seemed a good idea to bring Wayne Henley and David Brooks face to face. Then get Henley to show them where the bodies were buried at Lake Sam Rayburn.
When they arrived at the Houston police station, Lieutenant Breck Porter took Mullican aside. David Brooks was doing plenty of ‘confessing’, but it was all about Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. According to Brooks he had been merely an innocent bystander.
David Brooks proved to be a tall, round-faced, long-haired youth who wore granny glasses; apparently he had recently married. He looked startled to see Wayne Henley—no one had warned him Henley was on his way. Henley stared across at his former friend. ‘David, I told ’em everything. You better do the same.’
Brooks looked defensive. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes you do. And if you don’t tell everything, I’m gonna change my confession and say you was responsible for all of it.’
David Brooks said he wanted to talk to his father, and was taken out of the room. Later that day, he was told he was under arrest for being implicated in the murders. He was subdued and tearful as he was led away.
Henley, on the other hand, seemed to have been infused with a new life since his confession. On the way out to Lake Sam Rayburn—a hundred and twenty miles away, in the Angelina National Park—he talked non-stop, and made a number of damaging admissions. ‘I choked one of them boys until he turned blue, but Dean still had to come and finish him off.’ When a deputy asked how a decent boy like him could get involved in murder, he made the odd reply: ‘If you had a daddy that shot at you, you might do some things too.’
An hour later he was leading them into the woods on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn. He was already implicating David Brooks, although not by name. ‘We picked them up and Dean raped and killed them.’ Asked by a reporter if there had been any torture, he replied cryptically: ‘It wasn’t what you would really call torture.’ But he declined to elaborate. Then, refusing to allow reporters and photographers to accompany them, he led the police to the sites of four more bodies. One of them had been buried underneath a board; it emerged later that when Henley and Corll had returned to bury another body, they had found a hand sticking out of the ground, so had re-buried it with the board on top.
Before darkness made further digging impossible, two bodies had been unearthed. The latest news from the boat shed in south Houston was that the digging was now finished, and seventeen bodies—or parts of bodies—had been found. The ones that had not been buried in plastic bags had decayed, so that little but bones remained. The body count so far was nineteen.
The following morning, it rose to twenty-one, with the uncovering of the other two bodies at Lake Sam Rayburn. By mid-morning, the convoy of police and reporters was on its way south to High Island, where Henley insisted there were eight more bodies buried.
The search of the High Island beach turned into a kind of circus. Three helicopters had arrived with camera crews, and the reporters almost outnumbered the crowds of morbidly fascinated spectators. Henley was in good spirits, offering to race the overweight sheriff up the beach—an offer which, in view of the 90 degree heat, the sheriff politely declined. David Brooks, who had been brought down from Houston, was much more subdued; he sat there much of the time, his arms around his knees, refusing to speak to reporters.
Only two more bodies were found that afternoon, bringing the total up to twenty-three. Later, four more would be unearthed on the beach. The other two mentioned by Henley were never discovered. But even a total of twenty-seven made Dean Corll America’s worst mass murderer so far.
While Wayne Henley was helping the police at Lake Sam Rayburn, David Brooks was offering the first complete picture of Corll’s career of homicidal perversion in the Houston interrogation room. He still insisted that he had never taken an active part in the killings, but his questioners suspected that this was because he had sworn to his father that he was innocent of murder. Henley, who seems to have been the more truthful of the two, stated that Brooks had taken an active part in several murders. The picture that emerged left little doubt that this was true.
Meanwhile, reporters were learning all they could about the background of America’s worst mass murderer. For the most part, it proved to be surprisingly innocuous.
Dean Arnold Corll was born on Christmas Day 1939, in Waynesdale, Indiana, the first child of Arnold and Mary Corll, who were in their early twenties. But the parents were temperamentally unsuited; both were strong characters, and their quarrels could be violent. Mary Corll adored her eldest son; Arnold Corll—a factory worker who became an electrician—was a disciplinarian who found children tiresome. When Dean was six, the couple divorced, and Arnold Corll was drafted into the Army Air Force. Mrs Corll bought a house trailer and drove to join her husband at his base in Tennessee, but the quarrels continued and they separated again. An elderly farm couple agreed to look after the boys—Dean had a younger brother, Stanley—while Mary Corll went out to work.
From the beginning, Dean was an oversensitive loner. Because his feelings were hurt at a birthday party when he was six, he always refused to go to other people’s houses. While Stanley played with other children Dean stayed at home.
The Corlls made yet another attempt at reconciliation after the war, and in 1950 drove the trailer to Houston. But the marriage still failed to work out, and they parted again.
At this point, it was discovered that Dean had a congenital heart ailment, and he was ordered to avoid sport. In fact it was hardly necessary; he was not the sporting type.
Life for Mrs Corll was hard; she worked while the boys went to one school after another. In 1953 she married a travelling clock salesman named Jake West, by whom she had a daughter. They moved to Vidor, Texas, a small town where, as one commentator put it, ‘the big event is for the kids to pour kerosene on the cat and set it afire’. Since he spent so much time without his parents, Dean became intensely protective of his siblings—a kind of surrogate mother.
Now a teenager, Dean took up skin-diving, but had to quit when he fainted one day, and the doctor diagnosed a recurrence of the heart problem. But he was allowed to continue playing the trombone in the school band. He was always quiet, always polite, and never complained or ‘fussed’.
One day, a pecan-nut salesman observed Mrs West’s efficiency at baking pies and asked her why she didn’t take up candy making. She liked the idea, and was soon running a candy business in their garage, with Jake West as travelling salesman and Dean as the errand boy and ‘gofer’ (‘go fer this, go fer that…’) He was often overworked, but remained cheerful and uncomplaining. After his graduation from high school at the age of 20, Dean went back to Indiana to be with Jake West’s widowed mother, while the family returned to Houston. There the candy business continued to be underfunded. Two years later, when Dean moved back to Houston, he took a job with the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and made candy at nights. Women who worked there were overawed at his industry.
In 1964, Dean Corll was drafted into the army. This seems to have been a watershed in his life, for it was the time when he first realized he was homosexual. No details are available, but it seems obvious that some homosexual affair made him realize what he had so far failed to suspect. Released from the army after eleven months—pleading that his family needed him to work in the candy business—he returned to Houston to find his mother’s second marriage in the process of dissolution. Mr and Mrs West had become business rivals rather than partners, and when Jake West threw her out of the shop one day, Mary West went off and started one of her own. Dean didn’t mind; he had never liked his stepfather.
Now living in an apartment of his own, Dean began making friends with the children of the neighbourhood—notably the boys—giving away free candy. Yet when a boy who worked for the company made some kind of sexual advance, Dean was angry and upset, and pleased when his mother dismissed him. Nevertheless, a fellow-worker noticed that another teenage employee always made sure that he was never left alone with Corll.
Dean’s mother remained intensely protective, treating him as if he was still a teenager. But he was once again seeing something of his father, for whom he had great admiration.
Meanwhile, Mary West now repeated her error and married yet again—this time a merchant seaman. She found him stupid and coarse, and soon began to suspect he was a psychotic. They divorced—and then re-married. He became neurotically jealous of his wife, and they separated again. But his continual attempts to force his way into the candy factory destroyed her enthusiasm for the place. When a psychic told her to move to Dallas, she took his advice, and divorced the merchant seaman yet again. And Dean, now left alone in Houston, suddenly felt that he was free to do as he liked.
Corll’s Mr Hyde aspect had at first manifested itself simply as a powerful attraction to boys, with whom he enjoyed playing the part of an elder brother. One boy said: ‘He acted real nice to me. He never tried to mess with me or nothin’.’ But the desire was there, and Mr Hyde began to break out when he realized that some boys would permit oral sex in exchange for money. Fourteen-year-old David Brooks was one of these. In fact, he was delighted to have an ‘elder brother’, and became totally emotionally dependent on Corll—so dependent that he made no attempt to denounce him when he learned that he was a killer.
This emotional dependence of David Brooks undoubtedly played a major part in the tragedy that followed. His love for Corll meant that he was willing to subjugate his will to Corll’s. And Corll, in turn, was encouraged to give way to his Mr Hyde personality. It was a case of folie à deux.
Brooks was a lonely schoolboy when he met Dean Corll in the Heights in 1969. The two had something in common: their parents had broken up, and they were on their own. Corll’s mother had wound up the candy factory she ran with her son’s help, and gone off to live in Dallas. Corll had found himself a $5 an hour job with the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and moved his few possessions into a shed. Corll had propositioned Brooks, and the teenager had agreed to allowing Corll to have oral sex for a payment of$5. But their relationship was not purely commercial. Corll was able to give Brooks something he needed badly—affection. Brooks, in turn, worshipped Corll: ‘Dean was a real good dude’, ‘a brilliant and generous man’. And when he returned to Houston in 1970—escaping from his disintegrating family—Brooks began to see a great deal of Corll: during the next three years they often shared rooms for brief periods. By that time, it seems probable that Corll had already committed his first murder. A 21-year-old student from the University of Texas in Austin, Jeffrey Alan Konen, had hitch-hiked to his home in Houston on 25 September 1970. He had last been seen at six o’clock in the evening, looking for another lift. It seems probable that it was Corll who picked him up, and invited him back to his apartment at 3300 Yorktown. Konen’s body was one of the last of those found—on High Island beach—and was so decomposed that it was impossible to determine cause of death. But the fact that the body had been bound hand and foot suggested that Corll had killed Jeffrey Konen in order to to commit sodomy.
What made Corll’s murderous mission so easy was the teenage drug culture of the Heights. In the claustrophobic, run-down environment, all the kids were bored and discontented; they felt they were stuck there for life. The mere suggestion of a party was enough to make their eyes light up. They all smoked pot—when they could afford it. They also popped pills—Seconal, Nembutal, phenobarbital, Quaaludes, even aspirin, washed down with beer or Coca Cola. But because it was cheap, acrylic paint was the easiest way of obtaining a quick ‘high’. Although one boy collapsed and died when he tried to play football after a long glue-sniffing session, it made no difference to the others; he was merely ‘unlucky’. Moreover, the possession of ‘glue’ was perfectly legal; and in an environment where a teenager was likely to be searched for drugs at any hour of the day, this went a long way towards making acrylics the most popular form of escape.
The fact that most of the kids were permanently broke conferred another tremendous advantage on a predatory homosexual like Corll. Allowing a ‘queer’ to perform oral sex was an easy and quick way of obtaining a few dollars. There can be no doubt that many of Corll’s victims had been back to his room several times before his demand for a more painful form of sex caused them to baulk, and led to their deaths. The fact that there were a fairly high number of runaways from the Heights meant that occasional disappearances caused little stir.
The central key to the Houston murders is Corll’s craving for sexual violation. At some point, oral sex ceased to satisfy him. Brooks admitted: ‘He killed them because he wanted sex, and they didn’t want to.’ Even Brooks himself seems to have withheld anal sex. He describes how, after he had introduced Corll to Wayne Henley, the latter knocked him unconscious as he entered Corll’s apartment; Corll then tied him to the bed and sodomized him. This would obviously have been pointless if anal sex had been a normal part of their relationship. Yet in spite of the rape, Brooks continued to worship Corll, and to participate in the murders and disposal of the bodies.
It also seems clear that Corll was in love with Henley. But Henley remained independent. Far more avaricious than Brooks, he became Corll’s accomplice for cash. In spite of Henley’s denial, there can be no doubt that Corll paid him large sums of money as a procurer. One friend of Henley’s later described how Henley had suggested that they should go to Australia together as homesteaders—Henley declared that he would provide the $1,700 each they would need. ‘Where would you get it?’ asked his friend. ‘I already have it.’ Henley’s later assertion that Corll never paid him is almost certainly an attempt to conceal the appalling truth: that he sold his friends to Corll for $200 each.
By the end of 1970, Corll was firmly in the grip of ‘Mr Hyde’. Brooks later tried to justify the murders: ‘Most of the boys weren’t good boys. This…probably sounds terrible, but most of ’em wasn’t no great loss. They was in trouble all the time, dope fiends and one thing or another.’ This is almost certainly a repetition of something Corll said to Brooks—perhaps on many occasions.
Not long after the murder of Jeffrey Konen, David Brooks walked into Corll’s Yorktown apartment unannounced, and found Corll naked. In another room there were two naked boys strapped to a plywood board. Corll demanded indignantly what Brooks was doing there, and ordered him to leave. Later, he told Brooks that he had killed both boys, and offered him a car as the price of his silence. In fact, he gave Brooks a new Corvette. The identity of these two victims has never been established, but they were probably among the bodies found on the High Island beach.
Having accepted the Corvette, Brooks was now an accomplice. He would go ‘cruising’ with Corll and offering lifts to teenage boys. One unknown youth was picked up some time in November 1970, and taken back to Corll’s apartment. Corll raped and murdered the boy while Brooks looked on. No further details of this murder—or victim—are known.
Corll’s appetite for murder was growing. Many of the boys he used to befriend in the days of the candy factory, and who had always been welcome visitors in his room, now noticed that he was becoming bad tempered and secretive, and they stopped calling round. Many of these boys later insisted that Corll had simply been ‘nice’ to them, without any attempt to make sexual advances. Many others, like David Brooks, had undoubtedly accepted money for oral sex.
On 15 December 1970, Brooks persuaded two boys back to an apartment that Corll had rented on Columbia Street. They were 14-year-old James Eugene Glass, and his friend Danny Michael Yates, 15. Both had been to church with James Glass’s father, and had agreed to meet him later. Glass had already been back to Corll’s apartment on a previous occasion, and had taken a great liking to Corll. This time, both boys ended on the plywood board, after which they were strangled. By this time, Corll had decided that he needed somewhere closer than High Island or Lake Sam Rayburn (where his family owned a holiday cabin), so he rented the boat shed on Silver Bell Street. The two boys were buried there.
Corll had apparently enjoyed the double murder so much that he was eager to try it again. Six weeks later, two brothers, 14-year-old Donald Edward Waldrop, and 13-year-old Jerry Lynn Waldrop, were lured to a newly rented apartment at 3200 Mangum Road. (Corll changed apartments frequently, almost certainly to prevent curious neighbours from gossiping about his activities.) The father of the Waldrop boys was a construction worker who worked next door to Corll’s new apartment. The boys were also strangled and buried in the boat shed. Brooks admitted: ‘I believe I was present when they were buried.’ This was typical of his general evasiveness.
On 29 May 1971, David Hilligiest, 13, disappeared on his way to the swimming pool; his friend, 16-year-old George Malley Winkle, also vanished on the same day. Malley was on probation for stealing a bicycle. That same evening, just before midnight, the telephone rang; it was Malley, contacting his mother to tell her that he was in Freeport—a surfing resort sixty miles to the south—with some kids. They would be on their way home shortly. That night, Mrs Winkle slept badly, with a foreboding that her son was in trouble. When he failed to return, she asked young people in the neighbourhood if they had seen him, and learned that he had climbed into a white van, together with David Hilligiest.
The frantic parents spent weeks following up every possible lead. They had posters printed, offering a thousand dollars’ reward, and friendly truckers distributed them all over southern Texas. So did a lifelong friend of David Hilligiest’s—Elmer Wayne Henley, another child of a broken home. He tried to comfort the Hilligiests by telling them that he was sure nothing had happened to David. A psychic who was consulted by the Hilligiests disagreed: he plunged them into despair by telling them their son was dead.
Ruben Watson, 17, another child of a broken home, went off to the cinema on the afternoon of 17 August 1971, with a few dollars borrowed from his grandmother; he later rang his mother at work to say he would meet her out at 7.30. He never arrived, and she never saw him again. Brooks later admitted being present when Ruben was murdered.
By this time, Wayne Henley had entered the picture. He had become friendly with David Brooks, and Brooks had introduced him to Dean Corll. Henley was intended as a victim, but Corll seems to have decided that he would be more useful as a pimp. The fact that Henley was skinny and pimply may also have played a part in Corll’s decision to let him live. The Hilligiests’ son Greg—aged 11—came home one day to say that he had been playing an exciting game called poker with Wayne Henley, David Brooks, and an older friend of Henley’s who made candy. Dorothy Hilligiest knew the man who made candy—in the previous year, she had gone looking for David, and found him at the candy factory with Malley Winkle and the round-faced man who owned the place. Mrs Hilligiest had bought a box of candy from him before she took David away…
Another friend of Henley’s was 14-year-old Rhonda Williams, a shapely girl who was as anxious to escape the Heights as most of its other teenagers. Since she had been sexually assaulted as a child, her attitude to sex was inhibited and circumspect. Like so many Heights teenagers, she was part of a one-parent family—her mother had collapsed and died of a heart attack as she was hanging out the washing. Rhonda craved affection and security, and she seemed to have found it when she met 19-year-old Frank Aguirre. He was slightly cross-eyed, but serious-minded, and was already saving money—from his job in a restaurant—to get married to Rhonda. But on 24 February 1972, Frank Aguirre failed to return home from his work, and was never seen again. He left his pay cheque uncollected. Rhonda was shattered and went into nervous depression for a year; she was only just beginning to recover on that evening of August 1973 when she informed Wayne Henley that she had decided to run away from home, and Henley took her over to Dean Corll’s house in Pasadena to stay the night…
On 21 May 1972, 16-year-old Johnny Delome vanished. The body was found at High Island fourteen months later; he had been shot as well as strangled. Johnny Delome must have been the youth that Henley shot up the nose, and then in the head. He was killed at the same time as Billy Baulch, 17, who was also buried at High Island. Six months later, Billy’s 15-year-old brother Michael would become another victim of Dean Corll. In the meantime, he had killed another two boys, Wally Jay Simoneaux, 14, and Richard Hembree, 13, on 3 October 1972. Their bodies were found together in the boat shed.
Another victim of 1972 was 18-year-old Mark Scott, whose body was was one of those that were never identified; Brooks stated that he was also one of Corll’s victims.
And so the murders went on into 1973: Billy Lawrence, 15, on 11 June; Homer Garcia, 15, on 7 July; Charles Cobble, 17, on 25 July, who vanished with his friend Marty Jones, 18, on the same day. The final victim was 13-year-old James Dreymala, lured to Corll’s Pasadena house to collect Coke bottles, and buried in the boat shed. There were undoubtedly other victims in 1973, possibly as many as nine. Brooks said that Corll’s youngest victim was a 9-year-old boy.
On Monday 13 August, five days after the death of Dean Corll, a Grand Jury began to hear evidence against Henley and Brooks. The first witnesses were Rhonda Williams and Tim Kerley, the two who had almost become Corll’s latest victims. It was clear that Kerley had been invited to Corll’s house by Henley in order to be raped and murdered—this is what Henley meant when he told Kerley that he could have got fifteen hundred dollars for him. He was exaggerating, but was otherwise telling the truth. And when Corll had snarled: ‘You’ve spoilt everything,’ he meant that the arrival of Rhonda Williams now made it impossible to murder Kerley. At that moment, it seems, he thought of a solution: to kill all three teenagers.
Rhonda Williams, it emerged, had decided to run away with Henley, whom she now regarded as her boyfriend. In fact, Corll knew all about the arrangement and had no objection—he himself was planning to move to Colorado, where his mother was living, and to take Henley and Rhonda Williams with him. The fact that he also planned to take an old flame of his pre-homosexual days called Betty Hawkins, as well as her two children, suggests that Corll had decided to give up killing teenagers. But Rhonda had arranged to run away on 17 August, nine days later; and when she arrived at Corll’s house in the early hours of 8 August, he felt that his fun had been spoiled.
After listening to the evidence of various teenagers, the jury indicted Henley and Brooks on murder charges. Henley was charged with taking part in the killing of Billy Lawrence, Charles Cobble, Marty Jones, Johnny Delome, Frank Aguirre and Homer Garcia; Brooks for his part in the murders of James Glass, Ruben Watson, Billy Lawrence and Johnny Delome. Efforts by the lawyers to get bail were turned down.
Houston was stunned by the events of the past week, and criticism of the police department was bitter and uninhibited. The main complaint of the parents of missing teenagers was that they had been unable to get the police to take the slightest interest; they were told that their children were runaways. The Police Chief Herman Short counterattacked clumsily by publicly stating that there had been no connection between the missing teenagers—implying that there would have been little for the police to investigate. The statements of Henley and Brooks—indicating that most of the victims knew one another—flatly contradicted this assertion. Short went on to say that the murders indicated that parents should pay closer attention to the comings and goings of their teenagers, a remark that drew outraged comments from parents like Dorothy Hilligiest, whose children had simply vanished on their way to or from some normal and innocent activity. Short went on angrily to attack the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, which had referred to the ‘murderous bureaucracy’ of the Houston police department, pointing out that the Soviet government had a reputation for making dissenters disappear. All this failed to impress the public or the politicians, and Short resigned three months later after the municipal elections.
There was also criticism of the attitude of the police towards the search for more bodies. One of Corll’s ex-employees, Ruby Jenkins, had mentioned the interesting fact that, during the last years of the candy factory’s existence, Corll was often seen handling a shovel and digging holes. He dug under the floor of his private room in the factory—known jokingly as the ‘pouting room’, because he often retired there to sulk—then cemented over the excavation. He also dug holes near the rear wall of the factory, and on a space that later became a parking lot. He always did this by night. His explanation was that he was burying spoiled candy because it drew bees and bred weevils. No one at the time questioned this curious explanation, or asked him what was wrong with placing the spoiled candy in a plastic bag and dropping it in the trash can. ‘He had this big roll of plastic sheet, four or five foot wide, and he had sacks of cement and some other stuff back in his pouting room.’ Clearly, this was something that required investigating. But when the police came along to look at the spots indicated by Ruby Jenkins, they dug only half-heartedly in a few places, and soon gave up. ‘Lady, this is old cement. There couldn’t be any bodies there.’
After the finding of bodies 26 and 27—on High Island beach, tied together—the search for more bodies was dropped, even though Henley insisted that two more were buried there. Another curious feature of this final discovery was that there were two extra bones—an arm bone and a pelvis—in the grave, plainly indicating a twenty-eighth victim.
Lieutenant Porter received two calls about bodies on the same morning. A Mr and Mrs Abernathy had been camping on Galveston Island—about fifty miles down the coast from High Island—when they saw two men carrying a long bundle over the dunes. Another man had been camping on east Galveston beach when he saw a white car and another car parked near a hole in the beach; a long plastic bundle the size of a body lay beside the hole. There were three men beside the hole. The man identified two from photographs as Dean Corll and Wayne Henley. The third man had long blond hair—like David Brooks. As the campers sat looking at this curious scene in their own car, Henley advanced on them with a menacing expression, and they drove off.
These two events took place in March and June, 1973. In fact, the first 1973 victim identified (from the Lake Sam Rayburn burial site) was Billy Lawrence, who vanished on 11 June. It seems unlikely that a man who had been killing as regularly as Corll should allow a seven-month period to elapse between victims (the last known victim of 1972 is Michael Baulch, Billy Baulch’s younger brother). The unidentified victims found in the boat shed had obviously been buried much earlier, probably in 1971.
The Galveston authorities flatly declined to allow the Houston police to follow up this lead, refusing to permit digging on their beach.
Meanwhile, the police switchboard in Houston continued to handle hundreds of enquiries about missing teenagers—one mother, whose son had been working with a circus, and had vanished in Houston, was certain that he was one of Corll’s victims. In most of these cases, the police were forced to state that they were unable to help.
When Brooks and Henley appeared for their arraignment, there was a heavy guard of armed police—dozens of threatening phone calls had been received from all over Texas. Henley’s defence lawyer, Charles Melder, indicated that his defence would be one of insanity. Brooks’s attorney, Ted Musick, indicated that he would follow the same line. At the same time, the District Attorney announced that each of the accused would be tried on one charge only: Henley for the murder of Charles Cobble, and Brooks for that of Billy Lawrence.
Since Corll was already dead, and the two accused had already confessed, the trial itself was something of an anticlimax. Its venue was changed, on the insistence of the lawyers, and it opened at San Antonio, Texas, in July 1974, before Judge Preston Dial. Predictably, the jury rejected the insanity defence, and Henley was convicted on nine counts (not including the shooting of Dean Corll), drawing a total sentence of 594 years. Brooks was convicted on only one count, and received life imprisonment. Henley appealed in 1979, and was convicted for a second time.
It is easy to understand the sense of shock produced by the Corll murders—analogous to that felt in England after the Moors murder case. The impression produced by the evidence is that Corll was a sadistic monster, the kind we would expect to encounter in a horror film, possessed by evil spirits. But our study of other serial killers—like Haarmann and Kürten—makes it clear that nothing is ever as simple as that. The evidence shows that Corll was basically a spoilt brat who always wanted his own way, and that he remained emotionally a child—this aspect of his personality is caught in the notorious photograph that shows him holding a teddy bear.
In fact, like so many serial killers, Corll drifted into it by slow steps—as a man becomes a drug addict or an alcoholic. He wanted young boys; he bought their sexual favours. Then he began raping and killing them. It was a gentle progression down a slope, like walking slowly into a pond…
This is also true of another case that received even more publicity than the Corll murders. Ted Bundy is a textbook Case of the ‘high IQ killer’.
On 31 January 1974, a student at the University of Washington, in Seattle, Lynda Ann Healy, vanished from her room; the bedsheets were bloodstained, suggesting that she had been struck violently on the head. During the following March, April and May, three more girl students vanished; in June, two more. In July, two girls vanished on the same day. It happened at a popular picnic spot, Lake Sammanish; a number of people saw a good-looking young man, with his arm in a sling, accost a girl named Janice Ott and ask her to help him lift a boat on to the roof of his car; she walked away with him and did not return. Later, a girl named Denise Naslund was accosted by the same young man; she also vanished. He had been heard to introduce himself as ‘Ted’.
In October 1974 the killings shifted to Salt Lake City; three girls disappeared in one month. In November, the police had their first break in the case: a girl named Carol DaRonch was accosted in a shopping centre by a young man who identified himself as a detective, and told her that there had been an attempt to break into her car; she agreed to accompany him to headquarters to view a suspect. In the car he snapped a handcuff on her wrist and pointed a gun at her head; she fought and screamed, and managed to jump from the car. That evening, a girl student vanished on her way to meet her brother. A handcuff key was found near the place from which she had been taken.
Meanwhile, the Seattle police had fixed on a young man named Ted Bundy as a main suspect. For the past six years, he had been involved in a close relationship with a divorcee named Meg Anders, but she had called off the marriage when she realized he was a habitual thief. After the Lake Sammanish disappearances, she had seen a photofit drawing of the wanted ‘Ted’ in the Seattle Times and thought it looked like Bundy; moreover, ‘Ted’ drove a Volkswagen like Bundy’s. She had seen crutches and plaster of Paris in Bundy’s room, and the coincidence seemed too great; with immense misgivings, she telephoned the police. They told her that they had already checked on Bundy; but at the suggestion of the Seattle police, Carol DaRonch was shown Bundy’s photograph. She tentatively identified it as resembling the man who had tried to abduct her, but was obviously far from sure. (Bundy had been wearing a beard at the time.)
In January, March, April, July and August 1975, more girls vanished in Colorado. (Their bodies—or skeletons—were found later in remote spots.) On 16 August 1975, Bundy was arrested for the first time. As a police car was driving along a dark street in Salt Lake City, a parked Volkswagen launched into motion; the policeman followed, and it accelerated. He caught up with the car at a service station, and found in the car a pantyhose mask, a crow-bar, an icepick and various other tools; there was also a pair of handcuffs.
Bundy, 29 years old, seemed an unlikely burglar. He was a graduate of the University of Washington, and was in Utah to study law; he had worked as a political campaigner, and for the Crime Commission in Seattle. In his room there was nothing suspicious—except maps and brochures of Colorado, from which five girls had vanished that year. But strands of hair were found in the car, and they proved to be identical with those of Melissa Smith, daughter of the Midvale police chief, who had vanished in the previous October. Carol DaRonch had meanwhile identified Bundy in a police line-up as the fake policeman, and bloodspots on her clothes—where she had scratched her assailant—were of Bundy’s group. Credit card receipts showed that Bundy had been close to various places from which girls had vanished in Colorado.
In theory, this should have been the end of the case—and if it had been, it would have been regarded as a typical triumph of scientific detection, beginning with the photofit drawing and concluding with the hair and blood evidence. The evidence was, admittedly, circumstantial, but taken all together, it formed a powerful case. The central objection to it became apparent as soon as Bundy walked into court. He looked so obviously decent and clean-cut that most people felt there must be some mistake. He was polite, well-spoken, articulate, charming, the kind of man who could have found himself a girlfriend for each night of the week. Why should such a man be a sex killer? In spite of which, the impression he made was of brilliance and plausibility rather than innocence. For example, he insisted that he had driven away from the police car because he was smoking marijuana, and that he had thrown the joint out of the window.
The case seemed to be balanced on a knife-edge—until the judge pronounced a sentence of guilty of kidnapping. Bundy sobbed and pleaded not to be sent to prison; but the judge sentenced him to a period between one and fifteen years.
The Colorado authorities now charged him with the murder of a girl called Caryn Campbell, who had been abducted from a ski resort where Bundy had been seen by a witness. After a morning courtroom session in Aspen, Bundy succeeded in wandering into the library during the lunch recess, and jumping out of the window. He was recaptured eight days later, tired and hungry, and driving a stolen car.
Legal arguments dragged on for another six months—what evidence was admissible and what was not. And on 30 December 1977, Bundy escaped again, using a hacksaw blade to cut through an imperfectly welded steel plate above the light fixture in his cell. He made his way to Chicago, then south to Florida; there, near the Florida State University in Tallahassee, he took a room. A few days later, a man broke into a nearby sorority house and attacked four girls with a club, knocking them unconscious; one was strangled with her pantyhose and raped; another died on her way to hospital. One of the strangled girl’s nipples had been almost bitten off, and she had a bite mark on her left buttock. An hour and a half later, a student woke up in another sorority house when she heard bangs next door, and a girl whimpering. She dialled the number of the room, and as the telephone rang, someone could be heard running out. Cheryl Thomas was found lying in bed, her skull fractured but still alive.
Three weeks later, on 6 February 1978, Bundy—who was calling himself Chris Hagen—stole a white Dodge van and left Tallahassee; he stayed in the Holiday Inn, using a stolen credit card. The following day a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach walked out of her classroom in Lake City, Florida, and vanished. Bundy returned to Tallahassee to take a girl out for an expensive meal—paid for with a stolen credit card—then absconded via the fire escape, owing large arrears of rent. At 4 a.m. on 15 February, a police patrolman noticed an orange Volkswagen driving suspiciously slowly, and radioed for a check on its number; it proved to be stolen from Tallahassee. After a struggle and a chase, during which he tried to kill the policeman, Bundy was captured yet again. When the police learned his real name, and that he had just left a town in which five girls had been attacked, they suddenly understood the importance of their capture. Bundy seemed glad to be in custody, and began to unburden himself. He explained that ‘his problem’ had begun when he had seen a girl on a bicycle in Seattle, and ‘had to have her’. He had followed her, but she escaped. ‘Sometimes’, he admitted, ‘I feel like a vampire.’
On 7 April, a party of searchers along the Suwanee river found the body of Kimberly Leach in an abandoned hut; she had been strangled and sexually violated. Three weeks later, surrounded by hefty guards, Bundy allowed impressions of his teeth to be taken, for comparison with the marks on the buttocks of the dead student, Lisa Levy.
Bundy’s lawyers persuaded him to enter into ‘plea bargaining’: in exchange for a guarantee of life imprisonment—rather than a death sentence—he would confess to the murders of Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman and Kimberly Leach. But Bundy changed his mind at the last moment and decided to sack his lawyers.
Bundy’s trial began on 25 June 1979, and the evidence against him was damning; a witness who had seen him leaving the sorority house after the attacks; a pantyhose mask found in the room of Cheryl Thomas, which resembled the one found in Bundy’s car; but above all, the fact that Bundy’s teeth matched the marks on Lisa Levy’s buttocks. The highly compromising taped interview with the Pensacola police was judged inadmissible in court because his lawyer had not been present. Bundy again dismissed his defence and took it over himself; the general impression was that he was trying to be too clever. The jury took only six hours to find him guilty on all counts. Judge Ed Cowart pronounced sentence of death by electrocution, but evidently felt some sympathy for the good-looking young defendant. ‘It’s a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer…But you went the wrong way, partner. Take care of yourself…’
Bundy was taken to Raiford prison, Florida, where he was placed on Death Row. On 2 July 1986, when he was due to die a few hours before serial killer Gerald Stano, both were granted a stay of execution.
The Bundy case illustrates the immense problems faced by investigators of serial murders. When Meg Anders—Bundy’s mistress—telephoned the police after the double murder near Lake Sammanish, Bundy’s name had already been suggested by three people. But he was only one of 3,500 suspects. Later Bundy was added to the list of 100 ‘best suspects’ which investigators constructed on grounds of age, occupation and past record. Two hundred thousand items were fed into computers, including the names of 41,000 Volkswagen owners, 5,000 men with a record of mental illness, every student who had taken classes with the dead girls, and all transfers from other colleges they had attended. All this was programmed into thirty-seven categories, each using a different criterion to isolate the suspect. Asked to name anyone who came up on any three of these programs, the computer produced 16,000 names. When the number was raised to four, it was reduced to 600. Only when it was raised to twenty-five was it reduced to ten suspects, with Bundy seventh on the list. The police were still investigating number six when Bundy was detained in Salt Lake City with burgling tools in his car. Only after that did Bundy become suspect number one. And by that time, he had already committed a minimum of seventeen murders. (There seems to be some doubt about the total, estimates varying between twenty and forty; Bundy himself told the Pensacola investigators that it ran into double figures.) Detective Robert Keppel, who worked on the case, is certain that Bundy would have been revealed as suspect number one even if he had not been arrested. But in 1982, Keppel and his team were presented with another mass killer in the Seattle area, the so-called Green River Killer, whose victims were mostly prostitutes picked up on the ‘strip’ in Seattle. Seven years later, in 1989, he had killed at least forty-nine women, and the computer had still failed to identify an obvious suspect number one.
The Bundy case is doubly baffling because he seems to contradict the basic assertions of every major criminologist from Lombroso to Yochelson. Bundy is not an obvious born criminal, with degenerate physical characteristics; there is (as far as is known) no history of insanity in his family; he was not a social derelict or a failure. In her book The Stranger Beside Me, his friend Ann Rule describes him as ‘a man of unusual accomplishment’. How could the most subtle ‘psychological profiling’ target such a man as a serial killer?
The answer to the riddle emerged fairly late in the day, four years after Bundy had been sentenced to death. Before his conviction, Bundy had indicated his willingness to co-operate on a book about himself, and two journalists, Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, went to interview him in prison. They discovered that Bundy had no wish to discuss guilt, except to deny it, and he actively discouraged them from investigating the case against him. He wanted them to produce a gossipy book focusing squarely on himself, like bestselling biographies of celebrities such as Frank Sinatra. Michaud and Aynesworth would have been happy to write a book demonstrating his innocence, but as they looked into the case, they found it impossible to accept this; instead, they concluded that he had killed at least twenty-one girls. When they began to probe, Bundy revealed the characteristics that Yochelson and Samenow had found to be so typical of criminals: hedging, lying, pleas of faulty memory, and self-justification: ‘Intellectually, Ted seemed profoundly dissociative, a compartmentalizer, and thus a superb rationalizer.’ Emotionally, he struck them as a severe case of arrested development: ‘he might as well have been a 12-year-old, and a precocious and bratty one at that. So extreme was his childishness that his pleas of innocence were of a character very similar to that of the little boy who’ll deny wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’ So Michaud had the ingenious idea of suggesting that Bundy should ‘speculate on the nature of a person capable of doing what Ted had been accused (and convicted) of doing’. Bundy embraced this idea with enthusiasm, and talked for hours into a tape recorder. Soon Michaud became aware that there were, in effect, two ‘Teds’—the analytical human being, and an entity inside him that Michaud came to call the ‘hunchback’. (We have encountered this ‘other person’—Mr Hyde—syndrome in many killers, from William Heirens and Peter Sutcliffe to the Boston Strangler.)
After generalizing for some time about violence in modern society, the disintegration of the home, and so on, Bundy got down to specifics, and began to discuss his own development.
He had been an illegitimate child, born to a respectable young girl in Philadelphia. She moved to Seattle to escape the stigma, and married a cook in the Veterans’ Hospital. Ted was an oversensitive and self-conscious child who had all the usual daydreams of fame and wealth. And at an early stage he became a thief and something of a habitual liar—as many imaginative children do. But he seems to have been deeply upset by the discovery of his illegitimacy.
Bundy was not, in fact, a brilliant student. Although he struck his fellow students as witty and cultivated, his grades were usually Bs. In his late teens he became heavily infatuated with a fellow student, Stephanie Brooks, who was beautiful, sophisticated, and came of a wealthy family. Oddly enough, she responded and they became ‘engaged’. To impress her he went to Stanford University to study Chinese; but he felt lonely away from home, and his grades were poor. ‘I found myself thinking about standards of success that I just didn’t seem to be living up to.’ Stephanie wearied of his immaturity, and threw him over—the severest blow so far. He became intensely moody. ‘Dogged by feelings of worthlessness and failure’, he took a job as a busboy in a hotel dining-room. And at this point, he began the drift that eventually turned him into a serial killer. He became friendly with a drug addict. One night, they entered a cliffside house that had been partly destroyed by a landslide, and stole whatever they could find. ‘It was really thrilling.’ He began shoplifting and stealing ‘for thrills’, once walking openly into someone’s greenhouse, taking an eight-foot tree in a pot, and putting it in his car with the top sticking out of the sunroof.
He also became a full-time volunteer worker for Art Fletcher, the black Republican candidate for Lieutenant-Governor. He enjoyed the sense of being a ‘somebody’ and mixing with interesting people. But Fletcher lost, and Bundy became a salesman in a department store. He met Meg Anders in a college beer joint, and they became lovers—she had a gentle, easy-going nature, which brought out Bundy’s protective side. But she was shocked by his kleptomania.
In fact, the criminal side—the ‘hunchback’—was now developing fast. He acquired a taste for violent pornography—easy to buy openly in American shops. Once, walking round the university district, he saw a girl undressing in a lighted room. This was the turning point in his life. He began to devote hours to walking around, hoping to see more girls undressing. He was back at university, studying psychology, but his night prowling prevented him from making full use of his undoubted intellectual capacities. He obtained his degree in due course—this may tell us more about American university standards than about Bundy’s abilities—and tried to find a law school that would take him. He failed all the aptitude tests and was repeatedly turned down. A year later, he was finally accepted—he worked for the Crime Commission for a month, as an assistant, and for the Office of Justice Planning. His self-confidence increased by leaps and bounds. When he flew to San Francisco to see Stephanie Brooks, the girl who had jilted him, she was deeply impressed, and willing to renew their affair. He was still having an affair with Meg Anders, and entered on this new career as a Don Juan with his usual enthusiasm. He and Stephanie spent Christmas together and became ‘engaged’. Then he dumped her as she had dumped him.
By this time, he had committed his first murder. For years, he had been a pornography addict and a Peeping Tom. (‘He approached it almost like a project, throwing himself into it, literally, for years.’) Then the ‘hunchback’ had started to demand ‘more active kinds of gratification’. He tried disabling women’s cars, but the girls always had help on hand. He felt the need to indulge in this kind of behaviour after drinking had reduced his inhibitions. One evening, he stalked a girl from a bar, found a heavy piece of wood, and managed to get ahead of her and lie in wait. Before she reached the place, where he was hiding, she stopped at her front door and went in. But the experience was like ‘making a hole in a dam’. A few evenings later, as a woman was fumbling for her keys at her front door, he struck her on the head with a piece of wood. She collapsed, screaming, and he ran away. He was filled with remorse, and swore he would never do such a thing again. But six months later, he followed a woman home and peeped in as she undressed. He began to do this again and again. One day, when he knew the door was unlocked, he sneaked in, entered her bedroom, and jumped on her. She screamed and he ran away. Once again, there was a period of self-disgust and revulsion.
This was in the autumn of 1973. On 4 January 1974, he found a door that admitted him to the basement room of 18-year-old Sharon Clarke. Now, for the first time, he employed the technique he later used repeatedly, attacking her with a crow-bar until she was unconscious. Then he thrust a bar torn from the bed inside her, causing internal injuries. But he left her alive.
On the morning of 1 February 1974, he found an unlocked front door in a students’ rooming-house and went in. He entered a bedroom at random; 21-year-old Lynda Healy was asleep in bed. He battered her unconscious, then carried the body out to his car. He drove to Taylor Mountain, 20 miles east of Seattle, made her remove her pyjamas, and raped her. When Bundy was later ‘speculating’ about this crime for Stephen Michaud’s benefit, the interviewer asked: ‘Was there any conversation?’ Bundy replied: ‘There’d be some.’ Since this girl in front of him represented not a person, but again the image of something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalize this person.
So Lynda Healy was bludgeoned to death; Bundy always insisted that he took no pleasure in violence, but that his chief desire was ‘possession’ of another person.
Now the ‘hunchback’ was in full control, and there were five more victims over the next five months. Three of the girls were taken to the same spot on Taylor Mountain and there raped and murdered—Bundy acknowledged that his sexual gratification would sometimes take hours. The four bodies were found together in the following year. On the day he abducted the two girls from Lake Sammanish, Bundy ‘speculated’ that he had taken the first, Janice Ott, to a nearby house and raped her, then returned to abduct the second girl, Denise Naslund, who was taken back to the same house and raped in view of the other girl; both were then killed, and taken to a remote spot four miles north-east of the park, where the bodies were dumped.
By the time he had reached this point in his ‘confession’, Bundy had no further secrets to reveal; everything was obvious. Rape had become a compulsion that dominated his life. When he moved to Salt Lake City and entered the law school there—he was a failure from the beginning as a law student—he must have known that if he began to rape and kill young girls there, he would be establishing himself as suspect number one. This made no difference; he had to continue. Even the unsuccessful kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, and the knowledge that someone could now identify him, made no difference. He merely switched his activities to Colorado. Following his arrest, conviction and escape, he moved to Florida, and the compulsive attacks continued, although by now he must have known that another series of murders in a town to which he had recently moved must reduce his habitual plea of ‘coincidence’ to an absurdity. It seems obvious that by this time he had lost the power of choice. In his last weeks of freedom, Bundy showed all the signs of weariness and self-disgust that had driven Carl Panzram to contrive his own execution.
Time finally ran out for Bundy on 24 January 1989. Long before this, he had recognized that his fatal mistake was to decline to enter into plea bargaining at his trial; the result was a death sentence instead of life imprisonment. In January 1989, his final appeal was turned down and the date of execution fixed. Bundy then made a last-minute attempt to save his life by offering to bargain murder confessions for a reprieve—against the advice of his attorney James Coleman, who warned him that this attempt to ‘trade over the victims’ bodies’ would only create hostility that would militate against further stays of execution. In fact, Bundy went on to confess to eight Washington murders, and then to a dozen others. Detective Bob Keppel, who had led the investigation in Seattle, commented: ‘The game-playing stuff cost him his life.’ Instead of making a full confession, Bundy doled out information bit by bit. ‘The whole thing was orchestrated,’ said Keppel, ‘We were held hostage for three days.’ And finally, when it was clear that there was no chance of further delay, Bundy confessed to the Chi Omega Sorority killings, admitting that he had been peeping through the window at girls undressing until he was carried away by desire and entered the building. He also mentioned pornography as being one of the factors that led him to murder. Newspaper columnists showed an inclination to doubt this, but Bundy’s earlier confessions to Michaud leave no doubt that he was telling the truth.
At 7 a.m., Bundy was led into the execution chamber at Starke State prison, Florida; behind Plexiglass, an invited audience of forty-eight people sat waiting. As two warders attached his hands to the arms of the electric chair, Bundy recognized his attorney among the crowd; he smiled and nodded. Then straps were placed around his chest and over his mouth; the metal cap with electrodes was fastened on to his head with screws and the face was covered with a black hood. At 7.07 a.m. the executioner threw the switch; Bundy’s body went stiff and rose fractionally from the chair. One minute later, as the power was switched off, the body slammed back into the chair. A doctor felt his pulse and pronounced him dead. Outside the prison, a mob carrying ‘Fry Bundy!’ banners cheered as the execution was announced.
The Bundy case makes it clear that, in one respect at least, the science of criminology needs updating.
It seems to be the general consensus among criminologists that the criminal is a social inadequate, and that the few exceptions only underscore the rule. Faced with difficulties that require courage and patience, he is inclined to run away. He lacks self-esteem; he tends to see himself as a loser, a failure. Crime is a ‘short cut’ to achieve something he believes he cannot achieve through his own merit. But everyone who reads this description must be aware that, to some extent, it fits himself. Being undermined by self-doubt is part of the human condition. Which of us, faced with problems, has not at some time chosen a judicious retreat?
The Bundy case underlines the point. Even as a schoolboy he was witty and amusing, and in his early twenties he developed a poise and confidence that were the envy of other males. Michaud quotes a fellow office worker: ‘Frankly, he represented what it was that all young males ever wanted to be…I think half the people in the office were jealous of him…If there was any flaw in him it was that he was almost too perfect.’
In their classic book The Criminal Personality (1976), Samuel Yochelson and Stanton E. Samenow argue that criminality is closely connected with inadequacy, laziness and self-pity; it is another name for defeat-proneness. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Bundy had tasted enough success to stand outside this definition. Then what went wrong?
Ann Rule’s book contains the vital clue. She comments that Bundy became violently upset if he telephoned Meg Anders from Salt Lake City—where his legal studies were foundering—and got no reply. ‘Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected—demanded—that she be totally loyal to him.’
In 1954, the science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt had encountered this same curious anomaly when he was studying male authoritarian behaviour for a novel called The Violent Man. He was intrigued by the number of divorce cases in which habitually unfaithful husbands had expected total fidelity from their wives; such a husband might flaunt his own infidelities, while erupting into murderous violence if his wife so much as smiled at another man. Such men obviously regarded women with deep hostility, as if they expected to be deceived or betrayed—this is why they chose to marry gentle and unaggressive women. Their ‘conquests’ were another form of aggression, the aim being to prove that they were masterful seducers who could have any woman they liked. Their whole unstable structure of self-esteem was founded upon this notion that women found them irresistible; so it was essential for the wife to behave like a slave in a harem. This also explained another characteristic of such men: that they could not bear to be contradicted or shown to be in the wrong; this also threatened their image of themselves as a kind of god or superman. If confronted with proof of their own fallibility, they would explode into violence rather than acknowledge that they had made a mistake. For this reason, Van Vogt labelled this type ‘the Right Man’ or ‘the Violent Man’. To his colleagues at work he might appear perfectly normal and balanced; but his family knew him as a kind of paranoid dictator.
Only one thing could undermine this structure of self-delusion. If his wife walked out on him, she had demonstrated beyond all doubt that she rejected him; his tower of self-delusion was undermined, and often the result was mental breakdown, or even suicide.
Expressed in this way, it seems clear that the Right Man syndrome is a form of mild insanity. Yet it is alarmingly common; most of us know a Right Man, and some have the misfortune to have a Right Man for a husband or father. The syndrome obviously arises from the sheer competitiveness of the world we are born into. Every normal male has an urge to be a ‘winner’, yet he finds himself surrounded by people who seem better qualified for success. One common response is boasting to those who look as if they can be taken in—particularly women. Another is what the late Stephen Potter called ‘One-upmanship’, the attempt to make the other person feel inferior by a kind of cheating—for example, by pretending to know far more than you actually know. Another is to bully people over whom one happens to have authority. Many ‘Right Men’ are so successful in all these departments that they achieve a remarkably high level of self-esteem on remarkably slender talents. Once achieved, this self-esteem is like an addictive drug and any threat of withdrawal seems terrifying. Hence the violence with which he reacts to anything that challenges it.
It is obvious that the Right Man syndrome is a compensatory mechanism for profound self-doubt, and that its essence lies in convincing others of something he feels to be untrue; in other words, it is a form of confidence-trickery. It is, that is to say, a typically criminal form of ‘shortcut’, like cheating in an exam, or stealing something instead of saving up to buy it.
Now the basic characteristic of the criminal, and also of the Right Man, is a certain lack of self-control. Van Vogt writes that the Right Man ‘makes the decision to be out of control’—that is, makes the decision to lose control at a certain point, exploding into violence rather than calling upon a more mature level of his personality. But he is adept at making excuses that place the blame for this lack of self-control on other people for provoking him. One British sex killer, Patrick Byrne, explained that he decided to terrorize women ‘to get my own back on them for causing my nervous tension through sex’.
But the lack of self-control brings its own problems. Every time it happens he is, in effect, lowering his own bursting point. Carl Panzram told Henry Lesser never to turn his back on him: ‘You’re the one man I don’t want to kill. But I’m so erratic I’m liable to do anything.’ He is like a man who has trained an Alsatian dog to leap at people’s throats, and finally realizes that the dog is stronger than he is. A 22-year-old sex killer named Stephen Judy begged the judge in Indianapolis to sentence him to death. He had been committing rapes and sex crimes since he was 12, and was on trial for killing a young mother and her three children. Aware that he would never be able to stop committing sex crimes, he told the jury: ‘You’d better put me to death. Because next time it might be one of you or your daughter.’ They agreed, and Judy was executed in 1981. Just before his death he told his stepmother that he had killed more women than he could remember, leaving a trail of bodies across the United States.
It should now be possible to see that the Right Man syndrome is the key to the serial killer, and that Bundy is a textbook case. From the beginning, he was obsessed by success: ‘I found myself thinking about standards of success that I just didn’t seem to be living up to.’ The affair with Stephanie Brooks made it seem that success was within his grasp; he went to Stanford to study Chinese. But he lacked the application and self-confidence and she threw him over. This was the turning point; his brother commented: ‘Stephanie screwed him up…I’d never seen him like this before. He’d always been in charge of his emotions.’ It was after this rejection that Bundy became a kleptomaniac. This may seem a strange response to the end of a love affair. But stealing is a way of making a gesture of defiance at society. And this is what Bundy’s thieving amounted to—as when he stole an eight-foot tree from a greenhouse and drove off with it sticking out of the roof of his car. It was essentially a symbolic gesture.
Seven years later, Bundy took his revenge on Stephanie Brooks. When she rang him to ask why he had not contacted her since their weekend together, he said coldly: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ and hung up on her. ‘At length’, says Ann Rule, ‘she concluded that Ted’s high-power courtship in the latter part of 1973 had been deliberately planned, that he had waited all these years to be in a position where he could make her fall in love with him, just so he could drop her, reject her as she had rejected him.’ Stephanie Brooks wrote to a friend: ‘I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder.’ The Right Man had escaped his feeling of vulnerability; he had established his dominance. Oddly enough, he committed his first violent sexual attack immediately after the weekend with Stephanie. He had proved that he was the conqueror; now, in this mood of exultation, he broke into the bedroom of a female student, battered her unconscious, and thrust an iron bar into her vagina. Three weeks later he committed his first murder. It was also completely typical of the Right Man that, when eventually caught, he should continue to deny his guilt, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
But the remarks of Yochelson and Samenow about inadequacy certainly apply to the case of David Berkowitz, known as ‘Son of Sam.’
On the night of 29 July 1976 two young girls sat talking in the front seats of a car on Buhre Avenue, New York City; they were Donna Lauria, a medical technician, and Jody Valenti, a student nurse. Donna’s parents, on their way back from a night out, passed them at about 1 a.m., and said goodnight. A few moments after they reached their apartment, they heard the sound of shots and screams. A man had walked up to the Oldsmobile, pulled a gun out of a brown paper bag, and fired five shots. Donna was killed, Jody wounded in the thigh.
Total lack of motive for the shooting convinced police they were dealing with a man who killed for pleasure, without knowing his victims.
Four months later, on 26 November, two young girls were sitting talking on the stoop in front of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens, New York; it was half an hour past midnight when a man walked towards them, started to ask if they could direct him, then, before he finished the sentence, pulled out a gun and began shooting. Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino were both wounded. A bullet lodged in Joanne’s spine, paralyzing her. Bullets dug out of a front door and a mail box revealed that the two young women had been shot by the same .44 that had killed Donna Lauria and wounded Jody Valenti.
Although the police were unaware of it at this time, the same gun had already wounded yet another victim. Over a month earlier, on 23 October 1976, Carl Denaro and his girlfriend Rosemary Keenan were sitting in his sports car in front of a tavern in Flushing when there were several loud bangs; then a bullet tore through the rear windscreen, and Denaro fell forward. He was rushed to hospital, and in three weeks, had begun to recover, although his middle finger was permanently damaged. The .44 bullet was found on the floor of the car.
On 30 January 1977 a young couple were kissing goodnight in a car in the Ridgewood area of New York; there was a deafening explosion, the windscreen shattered, and Christine Freund slumped into the arms of her boyfriend John Diel. She died a few hours later in hospital.
On 8 March 1977 Virginia Voskerichian, an Armenian student, was on her way home, and only a few hundred yards from her mother’s house in Forest Hills, when a gunman walked up to her, and shot her in the face at a few yards range; the bullet went into her mouth, shattering her front teeth. She died immediately. Christine Freund had been shot only three hundred yards away.
By now police recognized that the bullets that had killed three and wounded four had all come from the same gun. And this indicated a homicidal psychopath who would probably go on until he was caught. The problem was that the police had no clues to his identity, no idea of where to begin searching. Unless he was caught during an attempted murder, the chance of arresting him seemed minimal. Mayor Beame of New York gave a press conference in which he announced: ‘We have a savage killer on the loose.’ He was able to say that the man was white, about five feet ten inches tall, well groomed, with hair combed straight back.
On the morning of 17 April 1977 there were two more deaths. Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani were sitting in a parked car in the Bronx when the killer shot both of them. Valentina died instantly; Esau died later in hospital, three bullets in his head. Only a few blocks away, Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti had been shot.
In the middle of the street, a policeman found an envelope. It contained a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli, and it was from the killer. ‘I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I am a little brat…’ It claimed that his father, Sam, was a brute who beat his family when he got drunk, and who ordered him to go out and kill. ‘I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemen of Queens are prettyist of all…’ It was reminiscent of the letters that Jack the Ripper and so many other ‘thrill killers’ have written to the police, revealing an urge to ‘be’ somebody, to make an impact on society. A further rambling, incoherent note, signed ‘Son of Sam’, was sent to a New York columnist, James Breslin.
The next attack, on 26 June 1977, was like so many of the others: a young couple sitting in their car in the early hours of Sunday morning, saying goodnight after a date. They were Salvatore Lupo and Judy Placido, and the car was in front of a house on 211 Street, Bayside, Queens. The windscreen shattered, as four shots were fired. The assailant ran away. Fortunately, his aim had been bad; both these victims were only wounded, and recovered.
It was now a year since Son of Sam had killed Donna Lauria; on the anniversary of her death, Queens and the Bronx were swarming with police. But Son of Sam had decided that these areas were dangerous, and that his next shootings would be as far away as possible. On 31 July Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz were sitting in a parking lot dose to the Brooklyn shore; it was 1.30 on Sunday morning. The windscreen exploded as four shots were fired. Both were hit in the head. Stacy Moskowitz died hours later in hospital; Robert Violante recovered, but was blinded.
But this shooting brought the break in the case. A woman out walking her dog had noticed two policemen putting a ticket on a car parked near a fire hydrant on Bay 16th Street. Minutes later, a man ran up to the car, leapt in and drove off. Only four parking tickets had been issued in the Coney Island area that Sunday morning, and only one of those was for parking near a hydrant. The carbon of the ticket contained the car’s registration number. And the vehicle licensing department was able to identify its owner as David Berkowitz, aged 24, of Pine Street, Yonkers.
On the Wednesday after the last killing, detectives found the Ford Galaxie parked in front of an apartment building in Pine Street. They peered in through its window, and saw the butt of a gun, and a note written in the same block capitals as the other Son of Sam letters. The car was staked out. When David Berkowitz approached it at 10.15 that evening, Deputy Inspector Tim Dowd, who had led the hunt, said, ‘Hello, David.’ Berkowitz looked at him in surprise, then said, ‘Inspector Dowd! You finally got me.’
After the terror he had aroused, Son of Sam was something of an anticlimax, a pudgy little man with a beaming smile, and a tendency to look like a slightly moronic child who has been caught stealing sweets. He was a paranoid schizophrenic, a man who lived alone in a room lit by a naked bulb, sleeping on a bare mattress. The floor was covered with empty milk cartons and bottles. On the walls he had scrawled messages like ‘In this hole lives the wicked king’, ‘Kill for my Master’, ‘I turn children into killers’. His father, who had run a hardware store in the Bronx, had retired to Florida after being robbed. Nat Berkowitz was not Son of Sam’s real father. David Berkowitz, born 1 June 1953, was a bastard, and his mother offered him for adoption. He had felt rejected from the beginning.
He reacted to his poor self-image by boasting and lying—particularly about his sexual prowess. In fact, he was shy of women, and almost certainly a virgin when captured. He told the police that demons began telling him to kill in 1974—although one psychiatrist who interviewed him is convinced that this is untrue, and that Berkowitz’s stories of ‘voices’ was an attempt to establish a defence of insanity. Living alone in apartments that he allowed to become pig-sties, kept awake at night by the sound of trucks or barking dogs, he slipped into paranoia, telling his father in a letter that people hated him, and spat at him as he walked down the street. ‘The girls call me ugly, and they bother me the most.’ On Christmas Eve 1975, he began his attempt at revenge on women by taking a knife and attacking two of them. The first one screamed so loudly he ran away. The second, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, was badly cut, and had one lung punctured, but recovered. Seven months later, Berkowitz went out with a gun and committed his first murder.
The name Sam seems to have been taken from a neighbour called Sam Carr, whose black Labrador sometimes kept Berkowitz awake. He wrote Carr anonymous letters, and on 27 April 1977 shot the dog—which recovered. He also wrote anonymous letters to people he believed to be persecuting him. He had been reported to the police on a number of occasions as a ‘nut’, but no one suspected that he might be Son of Sam.
Berkowitz was judged sane, and was arraigned on 23 August 1977. He pleaded guilty, saving New York the cost of a trial. He was sentenced to 365 years in prison.
The aftermath is worth describing. His Yonkers apartment block became a place of pilgrimage for sensation-seekers. They stole doorknobs, cut out pieces of carpet, even chipped pieces of paint from Berkowitz’s door. In the middle of the night, people shouted ‘David, come out’ from the street; Berkowitz’s apartment remained empty, and a quarter of the building’s tenants moved out, even though the landlord changed its number from 25 to 42 Pine Street to try to mislead the souvenir hunters.
Worth mentioning as an interesting parallel to the Son of Sam murders is the Zodiac case, which took place in San Francisco in the 1960s. Between December 1968 and October 1969, an unknown killer committed five ‘random’ murders, and seriously wounded two more victims. On 20 December 1968 a man approached a car in a ‘lovers’ lane’ near Vallejo, California and shot to death two teenagers. On 5 July 1969 he opened fire on another couple in a car near Vallejo, killing the woman and wounding the man. Letters sent to two San Francisco newspapers were signed ‘Zodiac’, and claimed credit for the murders. Lines in code—decoded by a cipher expert—boasted that hunting humans was the most exciting of all sports.
On 27 September 1969, a plump, bespectacled man wearing a hood held two people at gunpoint in a picnic area beside Lake Berryessa and stabbed them both repeatedly, killing the woman. ‘Zodiac’ reported his latest murder to the police by telephone. Two weeks later, on 11 October, he shot to death a taxi driver in San Francisco, and sent a letter boasting of the crime to the San Francisco Chronicle, together with a bloody fragment of the driver’s shirt. This was ‘Zodiac’s’ last known murder, although he continued to write letters threatening more killings. On 22 October 1969, a man claiming to be Zodiac took part in a Bay Area phone-in TV programme—in which he identified himself as ‘Sam’. The call was, in fact, traced to the Napa State Hospital, and the caller proved to be a mental patient there. It is interesting to speculate if David Berkowitz read about the programme—which received nationwide publicity—and was influenced by it in choosing his nom de guerre.
Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the serial killer is one that he shares with most other criminals: a tendency to an irrational self-pity that can produce an explosion of violence. In that sense, Paul John Knowles may be regarded not merely as the archetypal serial killer but as the archetypal criminal.
Knowles, who was born in 1946, had spent an average of six months of every year in jail since he was 19, mostly for car thefts and burglaries. In Raiford Penitentiary in 1972, he began to study astrology, and started corresponding with a divorcee named Angela Covic, whom he had contacted through an astrology magazine. She flew down to Florida, was impressed by the gaunt good looks of the tall red-headed convict, and agreed to marry him. She hired a lawyer to work on his parole, and he was released on 14 May 1972. Knowles hastened to San Francisco to claim his bride, but she had had second thoughts; a psychic had told her that she was mixed up with a very dangerous man. Knowles stayed at her mother’s apartment, but after four days Angela Covic told him she had decided to return to her husband, and gave him his air ticket back to Florida. Knowles exploded with rage and self-pity; he later claimed that he went out on to the streets of San Francisco and killed three people. This was never verified, but it is consistent with the behaviour of the Right Man.
Back in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida on 26 July 1974, Knowles got into a fight in a bar and was locked up for the night. He escaped, broke into the home of a 65-year-old teacher, Alice Curtis, and stole her money and her car. But he rammed a gag too far down her throat and she suffocated. A few days later, as he parked the stolen car, he noticed two children looking at him as if they recognized him—their mother was, in fact, a friend of his family. He forced them into the car and drove away. The bodies of 7-year-old Mylette Anderson and her 11-year-old sister Lillian were later found in a swamp.
What followed was a totally unmotivated murder rampage, as if Knowles had simply decided to kill as many people as he could before he was caught. The following day, 2 August, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, he broke into the home of Marjorie Howie, 49, and strangled her with a stocking; he stole her television set. A few days later he strangled and raped a teenage runaway who hitched a lift with him. On 23 August he strangled Kathie Pierce in Musella, Georgia, while her 3-year-old son looked on; Knowles left the child unharmed. On 23 September, near Lima, Ohio, he had several drinks with an accounts executive named William Bates, and later strangled him, driving off in the dead man’s white Impala. After driving to California, Seattle and Utah (using Bates’s credit cards) he forced his way into a caravan in Ely, Nevada, on 18 September 1974, and shot to death an elderly couple, Emmett and Lois Johnson. On 21 September he strangled and raped 42-year-old Mrs Charlynn Hicks, who had stopped to admire the view beside the road near Sequin, Texas. On 23 September, in Birmingham, Alabama, he met an attractive woman named Ann Dawson, who owned a beauty shop, and they travelled around together for the next six days, living on her money; she was murdered on 29 September. For the next sixteen days he drove around without apparently committing any further murders; but on 16 October he rang the doorbell of a house in Marlborough, Connecticut; it was answered by 16-year-old Dawn White, who was expecting a friend. Knowles forced her up to the bedroom and raped her; when her mother, Karen White, returned home, he raped her too, then strangled them both with silk stockings, leaving with a tape recorder and Dawn White’s collection of rock records. Two days later, he knocked on the door of 53-year-old Doris Hovey in Woodford, Virginia, and told her he needed a gun and would not harm her; she gave him a rifle belonging to her husband, and he shot her through the head and left, leaving the rifle beside her body.
In Key West, Florida, he picked up two hitch-hikers, intending to kill them, but was stopped by a policeman for pulling up on a kerb; when the policeman asked to see his documents, he expected to be arrested; but the officer failed to check that Knowles was the owner of the car, and let him drive away.
On 2 November, Knowles picked up two hitch-hikers, Edward Hilliard and Debbie Griffin; Hilliard’s body was later discovered in woods near Macon, Georgia; the girl’s body was never found.
On 6 November, in a gay bar in Macon, he met a man named Carswell Carr and went home with him. Later that evening, Carr’s 15-year-old daughter Mandy heard shouting and went downstairs, to find Knowles standing over the body of her father, who was tied up. It emerged later that Carr had died of a heart attack; Knowles had been torturing him by stabbing him all over with a pair of scissors. He then raped Mandy Carr—or attempted it (no sperm was found in the vagina)—and strangled her with a stocking. The bodies were found when Carr’s wife, a night nurse, returned home.
The next day, in a Holiday Inn in downtown Atlanta, Knowles saw an attractive redhead in the bar—a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes; she went for a meal with him and they ended in her bedroom. But he proved impotent, in spite of all her efforts. He had introduced himself to her as Daryl Golden, son of a New Mexico restaurant owner, and the two of them got on well enough for her to accept his offer to drive her to Miami. On the way there, he hinted that he was on the run for some serious crime—or crimes—and told her that he had a premonition that he was going to be killed some time soon. He also told her that he had tape-recorded his confession, and left it with his lawyer in Miami, Sheldon Yavitz. In another motel, he finally succeeded in entering her, after first practising cunnilingus and masturbating himself into a state of excitement. But even so, he failed to achieve orgasm—she concluded that he was incapable of it.
Long before they separated—after a mere six days together—she was anxious to get rid of him. She had sensed the underlying violence, self-pity, lack of discipline. He pressed hard for another night together; she firmly refused, insisting that it would only make the parting more sad. He waited outside her Miami motel half the night, while she deliberately stayed away; finally, he gave up and left.
The following day, she was asked to go the the police station, and there for the first time realized what kind of a man she had been travelling with. On the morning after their separation, ‘Daryl Golden’ had driven to the house of some journalists to whom he had been introduced four days earlier, and offered to drive Susan Mackenzie to the hairdresser. Instead, he took the wrong turn, and told her that he wanted to have sex with her, and would not hurt her if she complied. When he stopped the car and pointed a gun at her, she succeeded in jumping out and waved frantically at a passing car. Knowles drove off. Later, alerted to the attempted rape, a squad car tried to stop Knowles, but he pointed a shotgun at the policeman and drove off.
Knowles knew that he had to get rid of the stolen car. In West Palm Beach, he forced his way into a house, and took a girl named Barbara Tucker hostage, driving off in her Volkswagen, leaving her sister (in a wheelchair) and 6-year-old child unharmed. He held Barbara Tucker captive in a motel in Fort Pierce for a night and day, then finally left her tied up and drove off in her car.
Next day, Patrolman Charles F. Campbell flagged down the Volkswagen—now with altered licence plates—and found himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun. He was taken captive and driven off, handcuffed, in his own patrol car. But the brakes were poor, and, using the police siren, he forced another car—driven by businessman John Meyer—off the road, then drove off in Meyer’s car, with Meyer and the patrolman in the back. In Pulaski County, Georgia, Knowles took them into a wood, handcuffed them to a tree, and shot both in the back of the head.
Soon after, he saw a police roadblock ahead, and drove on through it, losing control and crashing into a tree. He ran into the woods, and a vast manhunt now began, involving two hundred police, tracker dogs and helicopters. Knowles was arrested by a courageous civilian, who saw him from a house, and he gave himself up quietly.
The day after his appearance in court, as he was being transferred to a maximum security prison, Knowles unpicked his handcuffs and made a grab for the sheriff’s gun; FBI agent Ron Angel shot him dead. Knowles had been responsible for at least eighteen murders, possibly as many as twenty-four.
Sandy Fawkes had seen Knowles in court, and was overwhelmed by a sense of his ‘evil power’. But she had no doubt that he now had what he had always wanted: he was famous at last.
And enjoying his notoriety. The papers were filled with pictures of his appearance at Midgeville and accounts of his behaviour. The streets had been lined with people. Sightseers had hung over the sides of balconies to catch a glimpse of Knowles, manacled and in leg irons, dressed in a brilliant orange jumpsuit. He had loved it: the local co-eds four-deep on the sidewalks, the courtroom packed with reporters, friends, Mandy’s school chums and relatives of the Carr family. It was an event, he was the centre of it and he smiled at everyone. No wonder he had laughed like a hyena at his capture; he was having his hour of glory, not in the hereafter as he had predicted, but in the here-and-now. The daily stories of the women in his life had turned him into a Casanova killer, a folk villain, Dillinger and Jesse James rolled into one. He was already being referred to as the most heinous killer in history.
So at last Knowles had achieved the aim of most serial killers: ‘to become known’. He was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that he was ‘the only successful member of his family’.
In the second half of the 1970s, another case of serial murder by a homosexual aroused uneasy memories of Dean Corll.
Between 1976 and his arrest in December 1978, John Wayne Gacy, a Chicago building contractor, killed thirty-two boys in the course of sexual attacks. Gacy’s childhood—he was born in 1932—was in many ways similar to Corll’s, with a harsh father and a protective mother. He was a lifelong petty thief. Like Corll, he also suffered from a heart condition. In childhood, he had been struck on the head by a swing, which caused a bloodclot on the brain, undetected for several years. He married a girl whose parents owned a fried-chicken business in Waterloo, Iowa, and—again like Corll—became a successful businessman. (Maslow would point out that this indicates that both belong to the ‘dominant five per cent’.) He was also known as a liar and a boaster. His marriage came to an end when Gacy was imprisoned for sexually molesting a teenager (although Gacy always claimed he had been framed). Out of jail, he married a second time and set up in business as a building contractor. He was successful (although notoriously mean), and was soon regarded as a pillar of the local community—he was even photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the wife of President Jimmy Carter. His own wife found his violent temper a strain, and they divorced.
In 1975, while he was still married, one of his teenage employees vanished; it was after this that his wife noticed an unpleasant smell in the house. After their separation in the following year, Gacy made a habit of picking up teenage homosexuals, or luring teenagers to his house ‘on business’, handcuffing them, and then committing sodomy. They were finally strangled, and the bodies disposed of, usually in the crawl space under the house.
In March 1978, a 27-year-old named Jeffrey Rignall accepted an invitation to smoke pot in Gacy’s Oldsmobile. Gacy clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over his face, and when Rignall woke up he was being sodomized in Gacy’s home. Gacy raped him repeatedly and flogged him with a whip; finally, he chloroformed him again and left him in a park. In hospital, Rignall discovered that he had sustained permanent liver damage from the chloroform. Since the police were unable to help, he set about trying to track down the rapist himself, sitting near freeway entrances looking for black Oldsmobiles. Eventually he saw Gacy, followed him, and noted down his number. Although Gacy was arrested, the evidence against him seemed poor.
On 11 December 1978 Gacy invited a 15-year-old boy, Robert Piest, to his house to talk about a summer job. When the youth failed to return, police tracked down the building contractor who had offered him the job, and questioned him at his home in Des Plaines. Alerted by the odour, they investigated the crawl space and found fifteen bodies and parts of others. When Gacy had run out of space, he had started dumping bodies in the river.
Gacy’s story was that he was a ‘dissociated’ personality, and that the murders were committed by an evil part of himself called Jack. In court, one youth described how Gacy had pulled him up, posing as a police officer, then handcuffed him at gunpoint. Back in Gacy’s home, he was sodomized, after which Gacy made an attempt to drown him in the bath; but Gacy changed his mind and raped him again. Then, after holding his head under water until he became unconscious, Gacy urinated on him, then played Russian roulette with a gun which turned out to contain only a blank. Finally, Gacy released him, warning him that the police would not believe his story. Gacy proved to be right. The jury who tried him believed a psychiatrist who told them that Gacy was suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder that did not amount to insanity, and on 13 March 1980 John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to death.
But the case that, in retrospect, seems most typical of the late 1970s—in the way that Manson seems typical of the late 1960s—is that of the Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono.
In fact, the first book on the case was called simply The Hillside Strangler,1 because at that time the role of Bianchi’s cousin was not fully grasped. Since then, it has become clear that this is one of these cases in which the interaction of two criminal personalities produces an explosive combination.
The crimes attributed to the Hillside Strangler took place in Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978. But it was another crime, which took place a year later, and almost a thousand miles to the north, that finally led the police to the killers.
The small town of Bellingham, in Washington State, looks out on one of the most beautiful views in the American northwest: the pine-covered slopes of San Juan and Vancouver Islands, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. With a population of only forty thousand, violent crime is a rarity. Which is why, when police chief Terry Mangan was told on a Friday morning that two girls were missing his first thought was that they had decided to go off on a long weekend. Their names were Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, and both were students at Western Washington University. Karen’s boyfriend was insistent that she would never go away without telling him. And when Police Chief Mangan learned that Karen had left her pet cat unfed, he had a sudden intuition that he was dealing with a double murder.
On the previous evening—11 January 1979—Karen had told her boyfriend that she and Diane were going on a ‘house-sitting’ job. It was at the home of a couple who were travelling in Europe. Apparently its security alarm system had failed, and Karen merely had to sit there for two hours while the alarm was taken away and repaired; moreover she would be paid $100 for the inconvenience.
The man who had offered her this job was a security supervisor named Kenneth Bianchi. Mangan’s first step was to check with Bianchi’s boss Mark Lawrence, who owned the Coastal Security agency. Lawrence declared positively that it was impossible that Ken Bianchi had anything to do with the disappearance of the two girls. He was a young man of excellent reputation, and a conscientious worker. He lived with a local girl named Kelli Boyd; they had a baby son, and Bianchi was known to be a devoted father and breadwinner. In any case, he had no authority to offer Karen a ‘house-sitting’ job. There had to be some kind of mistake…
This was soon confirmed by Bianchi himself. He told his boss that he had never heard of Karen Mandic, and had certainly offered no one a house-sitting job. He had spent Thursday evening at a Sheriff’s Reserve meeting.
But by now, the police had learned some strange facts about the house-sitting job. Karen had told her boyfriend that the man who had offered it had sworn her to secrecy. He had also telephoned the woman who lived next door to the house, and who went in once a day to water the plants, to warn her not to go near it during the course of the evening. He explained that the security alarm was being repaired, and armed guards would be on patrol. It began to look as if someone had lured the missing students to the empty house.
Police were immediately despatched to the empty house in the expensive Bayside area. A locksmith opened the front door, and the detectives entered cautiously. They were half-expecting to find two corpses, but everything seemed to be in order. The house was neat, and there was no sign of a struggle. But on the kitchen floor, the searchers found a single wet footprint. It was that of a man, and since it was still wet, must have been made within the last twelve hours or so.
At noon that day, the local radio began broadcasting descriptions of Karen’s car—a green Mercury Bobcat—and asking the public to report any sightings. At 4.30 that afternoon, the description was heard by a woman who had just come home from work. She had seen such a car when she left home that morning, parked in a nearby cul-de-sac. She immediately rang the police.
As Detective Bill Geddes approached the car, he already knew what he was going to find. A glance through the rear window confirmed his fear. The corpses of the two girls lay huddled together, as if they had been thrown into the vehicle. Both were fully clothed. Examination by the police doctor would reveal that both had been violently strangled and then subjected to some form of sexual assault.
Bianchi was obviously the chief suspect; he had to be arrested immediately. But at this point no one knew where he was; he was out somewhere driving his security truck. His boss, Mark Lawrence, agreed to set a trap. He contacted Bianchi by radio and asked him to go to a guard shack on the south side of town to receive instructions. Half an hour later, the police car arrived. The detectives approached cautiously; they had been warned that Bianchi was armed. But the good-looking young man who was waiting for them merely looked surprised to see them, and surrendered without protest. He seemed so totally free of guilt that Detective Terry Wright, who made the arrest, began to suspect that this was all a mistake. Either Ken Bianchi was innocent, or he was a superb actor.
Back at the police station, Bianchi denied knowing Karen Mandic. If someone calling himself Kenneth Bianchi had offered her a job, then it must be some impostor who had been using his name. The interrogators were inclined to believe him. They were even more convinced when Kelli Boyd, his common-law wife, arrived at the station. She was obviously horrified at the very idea that Ken Bianchi might be a murderer. He was a gentle lover and adoring father, totally incapable of violence. When the police asked permission to search their home, both gave it without hesitation.
The search revealed that, whether Bianchi was a murderer or not, he was certainly a thief. Hidden in the basement, the police found several expensive telephones and a new chain saw in its box; all these items had been reported stolen from places where Bianchi had worked as a security guard. Bianchi was charged with grand theft, and taken to the county jail.
A search of Bianchi’s security truck revealed more evidence—the keys of the Bayside house, and a woman’s scarf. Diane Wilder’s friends reported that she had a passion for scarves.
But the most convincing evidence came from examination of the bodies. Both girls had been strangled by some kind of ligature applied from behind, and its angle also made it clear that the murderer had been standing above them at the time, as if walking downstairs. On the stairs leading to the basement of the Bayside home, detectives found a single pubic hair. Two more pubic hairs fell from Diane Wilder’s body when it was lifted on to a sterile sheet. Semen stains were found on the underwear of both girls. Examination of Bianchi’s underwear also revealed semen stains. Diane had been menstruating at the time of her death, and there was also menstrual blood on Bianchi’s underpants. Carpet fibres found on the clothing of both girls, and on the soles of their shoes, matched the fibres in the empty house. For all his protestations of innocence, Bianchi had to be guilty.
Now, at last, it became possible tentatively to reconstruct the crime. Ken Bianchi had telephoned Karen Mandic and offered her the house-sitting job—he had made her acquaintance when he was a security guard in the department store where she worked. (This made it clear that he was lying when he said he had never heard of her.) He had sworn her to silence ‘for security reasons’. But Karen had told her boyfriend where she was going. She had also telephoned a friend who was a security guard at the university and told him about the job. Her friend had been suspicious about the size of the remuneration, but he knew that the Bayside area contained many wealthy homes, full of valuables. If this was one of them, it could be worth it.
At seven o’clock that evening, Karen and Diane had driven to the Bayside house. Bianchi was already waiting for them in his security truck—local residents had noticed it. Karen parked her car in the drive, outside the front door. Bianchi had asked her to accompany him inside to turn on the lights, while Diane waited in the Mercury. When he reappeared a few minutes later, Diane had no suspicion that her friend was now lying dead in the basement. Like Karen, she walked down the stairs with Bianchi behind her, and the ligature was dropped over her neck and pulled tight with tremendous force. As far as could be determined, the killer had not raped either girl—or had been satisfied with only brief penetration, ejaculating on the underwear. Then he had carried both bodies out to Karen’s car, and dumped them in the back. He drove to the cul-de-sac, carefully wiped the car clean of fingerprints, and walked back to the Bayside house where his own truck was parked, disposing of the ligature on the way. The baffling thing about the crime was that it seemed so oddly pointless.
Still, the case against Bianchi looked conclusive, even though he continued to insist—with the greatest apparent sincerity—that he had no memory of the murders. His bail was posted at $150,000. And now he was safely in jail, the police began checking on his background. He had been living in Glendale, a town (or suburb) eight miles north of downtown Los Angeles, before his move to Bellingham in the previous May. An investigating detective rang the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to see if they knew anything about Kenneth Bianchi. The call was taken by Detective Sergeant Frank Salerno, of the Homicide Division. And when Salerno was told that a former Glendale resident named Kenneth Bianchi had been booked on suspicion of a double sex murder, he was seized by immense excitement.
For the past fourteen months, Salerno had been looking for a sex killer who had committed a dozen similar murders in Los Angeles. The newspapers had christened him the Hillside Strangler. The last murder had taken place shortly before Bianchi left Los Angeles for Bellingham.
The first corpse had been found sprawled on a hillside near Forest Lawn cemetery, south of the Ventura freeway. The girl was tall and black, and had been stripped naked. It seemed clear that her body had been removed from a car and tossed down the slope.
It was the morning of 17 October 1977. The girl’s body temperature indicated that she had been killed some time the previous evening. The first problem was to identify her, and this proved unexpectedly easy. Her prints were on file, and revealed her to be a prostitute named Yolanda Washington, who operated around Hollywood Boulevard. The autopsy showed that sexual relations had taken place and had involved two men. One of these was a ‘non-secretor’, a man whose blood group cannot be determined from his bodily fluids. But the men could simply have been ‘johns’, and had nothing to do with her murder. Cause of death was strangulation with a piece of cloth, and it had taken place when she was lying down, with the murderer above her, possibly on the floor of a car.
The crime aroused little interest in the media; murders of prostitutes are too common to rate wide coverage.
The same was true of a second victim, discovered on the morning of 1 November. She lay close to the kerb in Alta Terrace Drive in La Crescenta, a town not far from Glendale, and it looked again as if she had been dumped from a car. As in the case of Yolanda Washington the body was naked, and death was due to strangulation with a ligature. She was little more than a child—15 at the most. Marks on her wrists and ankles, and in the area of her mouth, indicated that she had been bound with adhesive tape. Fibres on her eyelids also revealed that she had been blindfolded.
The autopsy disclosed a possible connection with the murder of Yolanda Washington. The girl had been subjected to anal and vaginal intercourse by two men, one of them a non-secretor. The position of the body also indicated that she had been carried by two men, one holding her under the armpits and the other by the knees. All this was an advance on the Yolanda Washington case. Now at least the police knew they were looking for two killers.
This time, unfortunately, her prints were not on file. Sergeant Frank Salerno, investigating her death, had no definite starting point. A hunch led him to ask questions in the area of Hollywood Boulevard, and to display the police artist’s sketch of the dead girl to its floating population of drug addicts and prostitutes. Several of the ‘street people’ had told him that she resembled a girl called Judy Miller, who had not been seen recently. It took Salerno another week to track down her parents. They lived in a cheap motel room, and one of their two remaining children slept in a cardboard box. With the curious lack of response of people who have received too many blows, they identified the morgue photographs as their daughter Judy, who had run away from home a month ago. Salerno already knew that she had made a living from prostitution—but in a half-hearted, amateurish way. She had given it away free to a casual boyfriend only an hour before she was last seen alive.
By the time Salerno located Judy’s parents, there had already been another nude murder. On 6 November, a jogger near the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale saw the body lying near the golf course. She had been strangled with a ligature and subjected to a sexual assault that had caused vaginal bleeding. This time identification was easy. Soon after a news broadcast describing the discovery of the body, a man telephoned the police to say that his daughter had been missing for two days. She was a 20-year-old dancer named Lissa Kastin, and she had recently been working as a waitress. The man’s description made it likely that she was the unknown victim, and an hour later, Lissa Kastin’s father identified her face on a television monitor screen.
Glendale was outside Salerno’s jurisdiction, but he went to view the body nevertheless. The ligature marks around the neck, and lines around the wrists and ankles, suggested that the stranglers had been at work again. As Frank Salerno looked down at the body—the third in three weeks—it passed through his mind that this was beginning to look like an epidemic.
Even Salerno was unprepared for what actually happened in the last three weeks of November 1977—seven more strangled corpses, six of them naked. Eighteen-year-old Jill Barcomb, discovered on 10 November, was a prostitute; her body was found at Franklin Cyn Drive and Mulholland. Kathleen Robinson, 17, differed from the other victims in being clothed when her body was found at Pico and Ocean Boulevards on 17 November, so it was possible that she was not another victim of the sex killer.
But the day that shocked the media into awareness of the ‘Hillside Strangler’ was Sunday 20 November, when three nude corpses were found, two of them schoolgirls. These were Dollie Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, and their bodies were discovered on a rubbish dump in an obscure street called Landa, near Stadium Way. The 9-year-old boy who found them thought they were discarded mannequins from a department store. Both girls had been missing since the previous Sunday evening, and the autopsy revealed that both had been raped and sodomized. Earlier that same day, another nude body had been discovered on a street corner in the hills that separate Glendale from Eagle Rock. The following morning, a missing person report helped to identify her as Kristina Weckler, a 20-year-old art student who lived in an apartment building in Glendale.
The next body was found on 23 November, in some bushes off the Golden State freeway. She was identified as a 28-year-old scientology student named Jane King, who had been missing since 9 November. And the last victim of that November of spree killing was found in some bushes in Cliff Drive, Glendale on the 29th. Her parents identified her later in the day as Lauren Wagner, an 18-year-old student who had failed to return home the previous night. Lesions on her palms looked like burn marks, and suggested that she had been tortured before death.
Ten sex murders in six weeks was something of a record, even for Los Angeles, where there are several murders a day. The press reacted with a hysteria that was reminiscent of the coverage of the Son of Sam murders in New York earlier the same year. In fact, the ‘Hillside Strangler’ featured in television reports all over the world. (The police took care not to advertise their certainty that they were looking for two men, for the less the killers knew about the progress of the investigation, the better.) Women became afraid to go out alone at night, and shops that sold tear gas and Mace quickly ran out of supplies. By the time Lauren Wagner’s body was discovered, Los Angeles was in a state of panic. The reaction of the police department was to create a combined task force from members of the Los Angeles Police, the Glendale Police and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, for which Salerno worked.
In spite of the frustrating lack of clues, the investigation was making some progress. On the evening of the disappearance of the two schoolgirls, a boy had seen them go up to a car and speak to someone on the passenger side. Clearly, then, there had been a passenger. The girls had apparently been nervous of speaking to strangers, but one of them was known to admire policemen. It was therefore possible that the killers had posed as policemen. Under hypnosis, the boy was able to say that the car was a large two-colour sedan.
There was also a promising lead in the Lauren Wagner case. Her father had looked out of the window on the morning of 29 November and noticed her car across the street. Closer examination showed that the door was open and the interior light still on. In the house in front of which the car was parked, a woman named Beulah Stofer described how she had seen Lauren abducted. As Lauren’s car had pulled up, another car—a big dark sedan with a white top—had halted alongside, and two men had got out. There was an argument, then Lauren had entered the other car and been driven away. Mrs Stofer had heard her say: ‘You won’t get away with this.’ She was even able to describe the men: the older one had bushy hair and was ‘Latin-looking’, while the other, who was taller and younger, had acne scars on his neck. Beulah Stofer had been alerted to the incident when her dog had barked.
When a detective talked to Mrs Stofer later, that day, she was in a state of near-collapse. The telephone had just rung, and a rough male voice with an East Coast accent asked her if she was the lady with the dog. When she said she was, the voice had told her that she had better keep quiet about what she saw last night, or she was as good as dead. It was a clear indication that the stranglers knew her evidence could be of central importance to the investigation.
If the police had grasped the significance of this phone call, they might have terminated the career of the Hillside Strangler within days. The only way a man could have obtained a telephone number without knowing the name of the subscriber was through some friend at the telephone exchange. A check on the girls with access to such information would almost certainly have revealed the Strangler’s identity. But in the general confusion of the investigation, this was overlooked, and the Strangler was free to strike again.
This happened two weeks later, on 14 December. The victim was a 17-year-old prostitute named Kimberly Diane Martin, and her naked body was found sprawled on a vacant lot on Alvorado Street, within sight of City Hall. This time there were more clues, for she had been sent by a call girl agency—appropriately named the Climax—to the Tamarind Apartment building in Hollywood. A man had called the agency, asking for a blonde in black underwear, for whom he would pay $150 in cash. The agency asked for the caller’s telephone number and queried what sounded like a public telephone. The caller assured them he was at home (although a later check on the number revealed it to be that of the public library). The girl was despatched to the Tamarind Apartments, and disappeared. The police interviewed everyone in the apartment building, and one tenant—a personable young man named Kenneth Bianchi—admitted that he had heard screams. And at the Hollywood public library, a woman described how a bushy-haired man had followed her around and glared at her ferociously. But there the investigation ran into its usual blank wall.
In mid-February, the police ignored what could have been another promising lead. A middle-aged schoolteacher described how she had seen two men trying to drag a girl into their car on Riverside Drive in Birbank; she had jumped out of her car and told the men to let the girl alone. One of them—a bushy-haired man—had snarled: ‘God will get you for this’; then they had driven off. The police decided that the woman was a crank and that her story was not worth investigating.
For the remaining weeks of 1977, there were no more murders, and the Los Angeles police hoped fervently that the Stranglers had moved elsewhere. On 17 February 1978, that hope was dashed when someone reported an orange Datsun halfway down a cliff below a lay-by on the Angeles Crest Highway north of Glendale. The trunk proved to contain another naked body. The girl was identified as Cindy Hudspeth, 20, a part-time waitress at the Robin Hood Inn, and ligature marks on the wrists left Frank Salerno in no doubt that she was another victim of the stranglers. The medical evidence indicated that two men had raped and sodomized her repeatedly.
Then, at last, the murders ceased.
That is why, when Sergeant Frank Salerno heard that Kenneth Bianchi had been arrested for a double sex killing, he lost no time in getting to Bellingham. And within hours of arriving, he was certain that he had found at least one of the Hillside Stranglers. A large cache of jewellery had been found in Bianchi’s apartment, and at least two items matched jewellery taken from the victims.
Bianchi was apparently continuing to behave like an innocent man, and was being highly co-operative. He had told the police that his only close friend in Los Angeles was his cousin Angelo Buono, an automobile upholsterer who owned a house in Glendale. Salerno was excited. A German detective had flown from Berlin solely to tell the Strangler task force that he believed the stranglers were two brothers who were probably Italian. At the time no one had paid much attention. Now it sounded as if he might be very close.
A check on Angelo Buono—by an undercover agent—made it seem highly likely that he was the other strangler. He had bushy hair, and was 45 years old—seventeen years older than his cousin Ken. Like Bianchi, Buono had been born in Rochester, New York, and Beulah Stofer, the woman who had received the threatening phone call, had thought the man had a New York accent. And when Bianchi’s face appeared in the Los Angeles newspapers, the schoolteacher who had interrupted the abduction of the girl in Birbank came forward again and told her story to Homicide Sergeant Bob Grogan of the Strangler task force. Her description of the two men certainly sounded like Bianchi and Buono.
More interesting information about Buono came from a wealthy Hollywood lawyer. In August 1976, he had telephoned a call girl agency—the Foxy Ladies—and asked for a woman to be sent over to his Bel-Air home. The 15-year-old girl who arrived at his home looked so miserable that the lawyer asked her how she came to be working as a prostitute when she obviously hated it. The answer, it seemed, was that a girl named Sabra had lured her from her home in Phoenix—where she was unhappy—to work for a man named Angelo Buono. Buono and his cousin Ken had terrorized the girl and told her that she would be killed if she tried to run away. Buono had subjected her to sodomy so frequently that she had to wear a tampon in her rectum. He also made a habit of forcing his penis down her throat until she vomited.
The lawyer was horrified, and promptly bought the girl an air ticket back to Phoenix. Buono had then made threatening phone calls—until the lawyer had sent a well-muscled bouncer to see him. The bouncer had found Buono working in a car, and when he addressed him, Buono ignored him. The bouncer had reached in through the window and dragged Buono out by his shirtfront, demanding: ‘Do I have your attention, Mr Buono?’ After that, the lawyer heard no more from Buono or his Foxy Ladies agency.
The lawyer was able to give Grogan the Phoenix address of Becky Spears, as well as that of the other call girl, Sabra Hannan, who had now returned to Arizona. They were brought to Los Angeles, and verified that Buono and Bianchi had offered them jobs as ‘models’, then forced them to work as prostitutes, beating them and threatening them with death.
As the detectives delved into his background, it became clear that Buono was a highly unsavoury character. He had been married four times and fathered eight children; all the wives had left him because of his brutality. He was proud of his sexual stamina—he was virtually insatiable—and liked to refer to himself as the Italian Stallion. He had several girlfriends, some in their early teens, and had habituated them all to fellatio and sodomy.
Grogan and Salerno were feeling pleased with themselves. There seemed little doubt that Buono and Bianchi were the Hillside Stranglers—in that order. Buono was the dominant one; Bianchi, for all his charm, was something of a weakling and a drifter. Even his girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, was sick of his lack of maturity—she had left him in Los Angeles to rejoin her family in Bellingham, but Bianchi had followed her there.
The police also thought they were beginning to understand how Buono and Bianchi had developed into serial killers. Their activities as pimps had made them accustomed to dominating and beating women. (Becky and Sabra had not been their only call girls; there were several more.) For a man who prided himself on his macho image, the episode with the bouncer must have been a keen humiliation for Angelo Buono—the kind of thing that could fester. And there had been another irritating setback. From an experienced professional prostitute, they had purchased a list of men who liked to have girls sent over to their homes. The list had been duly delivered, but turned out to be of men who wanted to visit a prostitute in her room. Buono had been enraged at the trick that had been played on him. He had no idea where to find the prostitute who had sold him the useless list. But he did know where to find one of her friends, an expensively dressed black prostitute who had been with her when the list was delivered. The name of the friend was Yolanda Washington, the first victim of the Stranglers…
It began to look as if the case was virtually tied up. Bianchi would undoubtedly be found guilty of the Bellingham murders. In Washington State, that would probably mean the death sentence. With that hanging over him, he would be eager to return to Los Angeles, where he could expect a life sentence. It would therefore be in his interest to confess to the Hillside murders, and to implicate his cousin. At present, evidence against Angelo Buono was slim; but with Bianchi’s co-operation, it could be made impregnable. Buono had now been interviewed two or three times, and his attitude had an undertone of mockery; he seemed to be enjoying the thought that the police had no real evidence against him All that, Salerno reflected with satisfaction, would change when his cousin returned to Los Angeles…
And then, with bewildering suddenness, the whole case threatened to collapse. What had happened was that Kenneth Bianchi had managed to get himself declared insane. Or, at all events, the next best thing: a ‘multiple personality’. In layman’s parlance, that means a Jekyll and Hyde character whose Jekyll is totally unaware of the existence of his evil alter ego.
Ever since his arrest, Bianchi had been insisting that he remembered absolutely nothing of the evening on which he killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. The police, understandably, thought that was a feeble and not very inventive attempt to wriggle out of responsibility. But Bianchi’s lawyer, Dean Brett, was impressed by his apparent sincerity, his protestations of horror at the thought of killing two women, and his hints that he was contemplating suicide. He called in a psychiatric social worker, John Johnston, who was equally impressed by Bianchi’s charm, gentleness and intelligence. If his protestations of amnesia were genuine, then there was only one possible conclusion: he was a multiple personality.
The general public had become aware of the riddle of multiple personality as a result of the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve, based on the book by two psychiatrists. But doctors had known about the illness since the early nineteenth century. It seems to be caused by severe psychological traumas in childhood, experiences so bad (like sexual abuse or extreme cruelty) that the personality literally blots them out and hides them away in some remote corner of the mind. In later life, some violent shock can reactivate the trauma, and the ‘everyday self’ blanks out, and a new personality takes over—for hours or sometimes days or months.
Whether Bianchi knew about multiple personalities at this stage is a matter for debate—the police were certainly unaware that he was an avid student of psychology, who hoped one day to become a professional psychoanalyst. What is clear is that Johnston’s suggestion came to him as a revelation. So did a showing of the feature film Sybil—another study of multiple personality—on the prison television. From this, Bianchi learned that ‘multiples’ often suffer from blinding headaches and weird dreams. He also learned that psychiatrists try to gain access to the ‘other self’ through hypnosis. So when Professor John G. Watkins, a psychologist from the University of Montana, suggested hypnosis, Bianchi professed himself eager to co-operate. And within a few minutes of being placed in a trance, he was speaking in a strange, low voice and introducing himself as someone called Steve. ‘Steve’ came over as a highly unpleasant character with a sneering laugh. He told Dr Watkins that he hated ‘Ken’, and that he had done his best to ‘fix him’. Then, with a little more prompting, he went on to describe how Ken had walked in one evening when his cousin Angelo Buono was murdering a girl. At which point, Steve admitted, he had taken over Ken’s personality, and made him into his cousin’s willing accomplice.
Frank Salerno and his colleague Pete Finnigan were sitting quietly in a corner of the room, listening to all this. In his notebook Frank Salerno wrote down a single word: ‘Bullshit’. But he knew that the investigation was in trouble. If Bianchi could convince a judge that he was a multiple personality, he would escape with a few years in a mental hospital. And since the testimony of a mental patient would be inadmissible in court, Angelo Buono would be beyond the reach of the law.
Back in Los Angeles, the investigation was looking slightly more promising. The boyfriend of Judy Miller—the second victim of the Stranglers—had identified a photograph of Angelo Buono as the ‘john’ who had enticed Judy into his car on the evening she disappeared. And Beulah Stofer, the woman who had seen Lauren Wagner pushed into a car by two men, identified them from photographs as Buono and Bianchi. That would certainly help the case against Buono. But without Bianchi’s testimony, it would still be a weak case.
The picture of Buono that had been built up through various interviews made it clear that he was brutal, violent and dangerous. He had hated his mother, and always referred to her as ‘that cunt’; later in life, it became his general term for all women. From the time he left school he had been in trouble with the police, and had spent his seventeenth birthday in a reform school. His hero was Caryl Chessman, the ‘Red Light bandit’, who liked to hold up women at gunpoint and make them perform oral sex. At the age of 20 Buono had married a 17-year-old girl who was pregnant, but left her within weeks. After a short period in jail for theft, he married again, and quickly fathered four more sons. But he was always coarse and violent: one day when his wife declined to have sex, he threw her down and sodomized her in front of the children. She left him and filed for divorce. So did his third wife. The fourth one left him without bothering about divorce. After that, Angelo lived alone in his house at 703 Colorado Street, Glendale. A friend who had once shared an apartment with him described him as being obsessed by young girls. The friend had entered the room one day and found Angelo peering down at a girls’ playground through a pair of binoculars and playing with himself. Angelo had boasted that he had seduced his 14-year-old stepdaughter. And one of Angelo’s sons had confided that his father had seduced him too. Clearly, Angelo Buono was a man who spent his days thinking and dreaming about sex.
Back in the Whatcomb County Jail in Washington, Ken’s sinister alter ego ‘Steve’ was also telling stories of Buono’s insatiable sexual appetite, and of his habit of killing girls after he had raped and sodomized them. These stories tended to contain certain anomalies—almost as if Steve wished to minimize his own part in the murders and throw most of the blame on Angelo—and the same applied to his later confessions to the police; but the general picture that emerged was clear enough. The first victim was the prostitute Yolanda Washington, who had been killed for revenge but raped by both men. They had found the experience so pleasant that two weeks later they had picked up 15-year-old Judy Miller, then,—pretending that they were policemen and she was under arrest—taken her back to Buono’s house, where both had raped her. The rape and kidnapping had been unnecessary, since she would have been glad to submit to sex for a payment of a few dollars. Then, with Bianchi kneeling on her legs, they had strangled her and suffocated her at the same time, placing a plastic supermarket bag over her head.
The next victim was the out-of-work dancer Lissa Kastin. They stopped her in her car and identified themselves as policemen, showing a police badge. Then they told her they were taking her to the station for questioning. Back in Buono’s house, she was kept handcuffed while they cut off her clothes with scissors. But when they found she had hairy legs, both men felt repelled. Bianchi raped her with a root-beer bottle, then strangled her, while Buono sat on her legs shouting ‘Die, cunt, die.’ Bianchi was in no hurry to kill her; he enjoyed tightening the cord until she lost consciousness, then loosening it to revive her; it gave him pleasure to feel that he had the absolute power of life and death. But they agreed afterwards that she had been a disappointment, a ‘dog’. They dumped her near the Chevy Chase golf course.
Four days later, on 9 November, they were out hunting again. Bianchi saw an attractive girl waiting alone at a bus stop and began a conversation; she told him she was a Scientology student, and Bianchi asked her to tell him all about it. In the midst of the conversation, Buono drove up, pretending he hadn’t seen Bianchi for months, and offered him a lift home. Jane King made the mistake of agreeing to let them drive her home. Back in Buono’s house, they were delighted to find that her pubis was shaven. She resisted Buono’s rape, and struggled so hard as Bianchi sodomized her that they decided she needed a lesson. She was hog-tied, and a plastic bag placed over her head while Bianchi sodomized her; when Bianchi climaxed she was dead. They were surprised to read later in the newspaper that she was 28; she seemed younger.
The shaven pubis had excited them both; now Buono dreamed of raping a virgin. Only four days after their last killing, they saw two schoolgirls, Dollie Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, boarding a bus in Eagle Rock Plaza. The idea of raping two girls at once appealed to them. They followed the bus, and when the girls disembarked near their home, beckoned them over to the car. Bianchi identified himself as a policeman and told them that a dangerous burglar was loose in the neighbourhood. The schoolgirls were vulnerable; they had just stolen a hundred dollars worth of costume jewellery from a department store, and were not disposed to argue with the police. Back in Buono’s house, both had been subjected to violation, then Sonja was murdered in the bedroom. When they came to get Dollie, she asked: ‘Where’s Sonja?’ and Buono told her: ‘You’ll be seeing her soon.’ Their corpses were dumped on a rubbish tip that Buono knew from his courting days. The police had reasoned, correctly, that whoever had dumped the bodies must have known the area intimately.
The next victim was a girl Bianchi had known when he lived in an apartment building on East Garfield, in Hollywood. Kristina Weckler was an art student, and she had spurned Bianchi when he had made advances. Now they knocked on her door, and Bianchi said: ‘Hi, remember me?’ He told her that he was now a member of the police reserve, and that someone had crashed into Kristina’s VW, parked outside the building. She went down with them to see, and was bundled into Buono’s car and taken to his house. After the rape, they decided to try a new method of murder: injecting her with a cleaning fluid. It produced convulsions, but not death. At Buono’s suggestion, they placed a bag over her head and piped coal gas into it, strangling her at the same time.
The Thanksgiving killing spree was almost over. On Monday 28 November 1977, they saw a red-headed girl climbing into her car, and followed it. And when Lauren Wagner pulled up in front of her parents’ home, Bianchi flourished his police badge and told her they were arresting her. While she protested—and a dog barked loudly in nearby house—they bundled her into their car and drove her away. When she realized that their purpose was rape, she pretended to be co-operative, mentioning that she had spent the evening in bed with her boyfriend and was ready for more. While being raped, she behaved as if she enjoyed it. Nevertheless, she was strangled, after an unsuccessful attempt to electrocute her had only produced burns on her palms.
The realization that they had been seen by a neighbour made them decide to be more cautious. But three weeks later, both were dreaming of another rape. Kimberly Martin, a call girl, was summoned to the Tamarind Apartments, and taken back to Buono’s. After raping her, both agreed she was no good in bed. Her body was dumped or a vacant lot.
The final Hillside killing was almost an accident. On 16 February, Bianchi arrived at Buono’s house to find an orange Datsun parked outside. A girl named Cindy Hudspeth had called to ask Buono to make new mats for her car. The opportunity was too good to miss. The girl was spreadeagled naked on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the legs, then they raped her for two hours. After that they strangled her. The Datsun was pushed off a cliff with her body in the trunk.
Bianchi had been twice questioned by the police in routine enquiries—he was one of thousands. But Buono was becoming nervous and irritable. He was getting sick of his cousin’s lack of maturity, his naivety and his carelessness. So when Bianchi told him that his girlfriend had left him and moved back to Bellingham, Buono strongly advised him to go and join her. At first Bianchi was unwilling—his admiration of his cousin amounted almost to worship. But Buono finally prevailed. On 21 May 1978, Kenneth Bianchi drove to Bellingham and rejoined Kelli Boyd and their newborn son. He obtained a job as a security guard, and was soon promoted to supervisor. But the small town bored him. He longed to prove to his cousin that he had the makings of a master criminal. And in the first week of January 1979, the craving for rape and murder became an intolerable itch. His mind went back to an attractive student called Karen Mandic, whom he had known when he worked in a department store.
A week later he was under arrest, and the Hillside stranglings were finally over.
The news that Kenneth Bianchi had accused his cousin of being his accomplice made Buono unpopular in the neighbourhood, and he received several threatening letters.
But it began to look more and more likely that neither Bianchi nor Buono would ever appear in a Los Angeles courtroom. In the Whatcomb County Jail, Bianchi had not only convinced Professor Watkins that he was a multiple personality, but had aroused equal interest and enthusiasm in another expert on the subject: Dr Ralph B. Allison, author of a remarkable work on multiple personality called Minds in Many Pieces. Allison’s obvious sympathy made ‘Steve’ even more confiding, and led him to make what would later prove to be a crucial mistake. At Allison’s request he revealed his last name: Walker—although at the time, this interesting and important fragment of information went unnoticed. And in the May issue of Time magazine, America learned that Bianchi had been pronounced a multiple personality by two of America’s most eminent psychiatrists. Ken was innocent; it was Steve who had killed a dozen or so girls.
At this point, the prosecution decided it was time to bring in their own expert. Dr Martin T. Orne, of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, was known as an authority on hypnosis. The sessions with ‘Steve’ had been videotaped, and Orne was able to study them. They failed to answer the question that troubled him most: whether Bianchi was hypnotized or only pretending to be. But he did notice that the character of ‘Steve’ seemed to develop during the course of the sessions. Steve was always coarse and foul-mouthed—his favourite term for the psychiatrists was ‘motherfuckers’—but he seemed to slip deeper into his role as the sessions progressed. To Dr Orne, that suggested an actor rather than a true alter ego.
When the professor came to interview him, Bianchi was his usual co-operative self. Under hypnotic suggestion, he quickly slipped into a trance. Orne now decided to try a crucial experiment. Good hypnotic subjects can be made to hallucinate the presence of another person. Orne told Bianchi that his defence lawyer, Dean Brett, was sitting in an empty chair. And Bianchi immediately did something that Orne had never seen before in a similar situation: leapt to his feet and shook the hand of the imaginary lawyer. At that moment, Orne was certain that Bianchi was only feigning hypnosis. Genuinely hypnotized subjects are content to talk to their hallucinations; they never try to touch them.
Now Dr Orne tried another interesting experiment. In the course of conversation, he casually dropped the information that most multiple personalities have more than one alter ego. And at the next session, Bianchi immediately produced another ‘personality’, a frightened child named Billy. Asked if he knew Steve, Billy whispered miserably: ‘He’s a bad egg.’ Now Orne knew beyond all doubt that Bianchi was malingering.
But it was Frank Salerno and his partner Pete Finnigan who made the discovery that finally exploded Bianchi’s claim to be a multiple personality. Listening to the Allison tape, they heard ‘Steve’ declare that his last name was Walker. Suddenly, both recalled that they had seen the name Steve Walker somewhere in Bianchi’s papers. A careful search revealed a letter to the registrar at California State University signed ‘Thomas Steven Walker’—in Bianchi’s handwriting—which requested a diploma without the name filled in. A little sleuthing revealed that the real Steve Walker was a graduate in psychology from California State University at Northridge, and he had answered an advertisement for a job by sending some of his academic papers. The advertisement had actually been placed by Bianchi, who had then used Walker’s name—and his papers—to obtain himself a fake diploma in psychology.
The defence psychiatrists declined to be convinced that Bianchi was shamming and should stand trial. (Dr Allison was later to admit that he was mistaken; he had meanwhile become a prison psychiatrist, and professed himself shocked to discover that criminals were habitual liars.) Dr Martin Orne and his colleague Dr Saul Faerstein—who had also interviewed Bianchi, at the request of the prosecution—were insistent that Bianchi was a malingerer, and it was their opinion that carried the day at the sanity hearing on 19 October 1979. At that hearing, Bianchi pleaded guilty to the two Bellingham murders and to five murders in Los Angeles, sobbing and professing deep remorse. Under Washington law, the judge then sentenced him to life imprisonment without the formality of a trial. But there were still five more murder charges to answer in Los Angeles. And when the Los Angeles County DA’s office offered Bianchi a deal—plead guilty and testify against his cousin, and he would get life with the possibility of parole—he quickly accepted. In interviews with Frank Salerno and Peter Finnigan, he described all the murders with a precision of detail that left no doubt that it was Ken, not Steve, who had committed them.
On 22 October 1979, Angelo Buono was finally arrested and charged with the Hillside stranglings. He was placed in the county jail, where Bianchi already occupied another cell. But Bianchi was already reneging on his plea-bargaining agreement, explaining that he had made it only to save his life, and that he was genuinely innocent. The reason for his change of heart was simple. The DA’s office had made the incredible decision to drop the other five Los Angeles murder charges, for which Bianchi could have been sentenced to death. So now he had nothing to lose by refusing to be co-operative.
As far as Salerno and Grogan were concerned, it did not make a great deal of difference. The jewellery found in Bianchi’s house linked him to some of the victims, while a wisp of fluff on the eyelid of Judy Miller, the second victim, was demonstrated by forensic scientists to be identical to a foamy polyester material found in Buono’s house. Strand by strand, the case against the Hillside stranglers was becoming powerful enough virtually to ensure Buono’s conviction.
For Bianchi, the case was by no means over. One of the characteristics of the psychopath is that he just never gives up. And in June 1980, Bianchi glimpsed an incredible chance of proving his innocence. He received a letter signed ‘Veronica Lynn Compton, pen name Ver Lyn’, asking for his co-operation on a play she was writing. The plot, she explained, was about a female mass murderer who injects male semen into the sex organs of her victims, thus making the police think that the killer is a male.
Bianchi was interested. He became even more interested when Veronica Compton came to visit him, and he realized that this glamorous brunette was obsessed by him. They fantasized about how nice it would be to go on a killing spree together, and Virginia suggested that they should cut off the private parts of the victims and keep them in embalming fluid. Soon after that they were exchanging love letters. Finally, Bianchi confided to her his brilliant scheme for getting out of jail. All she had to do was to go to Bellingham, and transform her play into reality: strangle a woman and inject semen into her vagina through a syringe. And Bianchi would then be able to point out that the Bellingham murderer was obviously still at large, and that he must therefore be innocent. But where would she get the semen? Simple, said Bianchi, he would provide it. And he did so by masturbating into the finger of a rubber glove, which he then smuggled to her in the spine of a book.
Veronica flew to Bellingham, and registered at a motel called the Shangri-la. In a nearby bar she made the acquaintance of a young woman named Kim Breed, and had several drinks with her. When she asked her to drive her back to her motel, her new friend agreed. At the Shangri-la, Veronica invited her into her room for a drink. Once inside, she excused herself to go to the toilet, armed herself with a piece of cord, then tiptoed out and sneaked up behind her unsuspecting victim, who was seated on the bed. Fortunately, Kim Breed was something of an athlete. She struggled frantically, and succeeded in throwing Veronica over her head and on to the floor. Then she fled. When she returned to the motel with a male friend, Veronica had also fled. But the police had no difficulty in tracing her through her airline reservation. She was arrested and, in due course, the ‘copycat’ slayer, as the newspapers labelled her, was sentenced to life. As soon as he learned of her failure, Bianchi lost interest in her, thereby fuelling deep resentment.
The case of Angelo Buono was due to come to court in September 1981. But pre-trial hearings, before Judge Ronald M. George, began long before that. The first matter on which Judge George had to make up his mind was a motion by the defence to allow bail to the accused. George turned it down. The next motion was to sever the ten murder charges from the non-murder charges such as pimping, rape and sodomy; this would ensure that the jury should know as little as possible about Buono’s background. Because it might provide grounds for an appeal, the judge decided to grant this motion.
The next development staggered everybody, including the judge. In July, the assistant District Attorney, Roger Kelly, proposed that all ten murder counts against Buono should be dropped. The reason, he explained, was that Bianchi’s testimony was so dubious and self-contradictory that it was virtually useless. Buono should be tried at a later date on the non-murder charges, and meanwhile be allowed free on a fifty-thousand-dollar bail…Grogan and Salerno could hardly believe their ears. It meant that even if Buono was convicted on the other charges, he would serve only about five years in jail.
The judge agreed to deliver his ruling on 21 July 1981. During the week preceding that date, morale among the police was at rock bottom; no one doubted that the judge would agree to drop the charges—after all, if the DA’s office was so unsure of a conviction, they must know what they were talking about.
On the day of the ruling, Buono looked cheerful and his junior counsel, Katherine Mader, was beaming with confidence. But as the judge reviewed the evidence, it became clear that their confidence was misplaced. Whether Bianchi was reliable or not, said the judge, the evidence of various witnesses, and the Judy Miller fibre evidence, made it clear that there was a strong case against Buono. Therefore, concluded Judge George, he was denying the District Attorney’s motion. And if, he added, the DA showed any lack of enthusiasm in prosecuting Buono, he would refer the case to the Attorney-General.
Buono, who had expected to walk free from the courtroom, had to cancel his plans for a celebratory dinner with his lawyers.
At this point the DA’s office decided to withdraw from the case. Thereupon, the Attorney-General appointed two of his deputies, Roger Boren and Michael Nash, to prosecute Buono.
The trial, which lasted from November 1981 to November 1983, was the longest murder trial in American history. The prosecution called 251 witnesses and introduced over a thousand exhibits. But although the transcript was eventually to occupy hundreds of volumes, the trial itself held few surprises. It took until June 1982 to get to Bianchi’s evidence—he was the two hundredth witness to testify—and he at first showed himself typically vague and ambiguous. But when the judge dropped a hint that he was violating his original plea-bargaining agreement, and that he would have to serve out his time in Washington’s Walla Walla—a notoriously tough jail—he became altogether less vague. Bianchi spent five months on the stand, and the results were damning to his cousin.
The defence team raised many objections, and pursued a tactic of trying to discredit witnesses and evidence. On the submission that testimony obtained under hypnosis should be inadmissible, the judge ruled that Bianchi had been faking both hypnosis and multiple personality. More serious was a motion by the defence to dismiss the whole case because one of the prosecution witnesses—Judy Miller’s boyfriend—had been in a mental home. This was also overruled: it was the defence’s fault, the judge said, for failing to spot the material in the files. Finally, the defence called Veronica Compton, the ‘copycat slayer’, to try to prove that she and Bianchi had planned to ‘frame’ Angelo Buono. Veronica, still seething with resentment, gave her evidence with histrionic relish. But when she admitted that she had once planned to open a mortuary so she and her lover could have sex with the corpses, it was clear that the jury found it hard to treat her as a reliable witness.
In the final submissions in October 1983, Buono’s defence lawyer Gerald Chaleff argued that Bianchi had committed the murders alone, and that his cousin was an innocent man. The judge had to rebuke him for implying that the whole case against his client was a conspiracy. The jury retired on 21 October 1983, and when they had spent a week in their deliberations, the defence began to feel gloomy and the prosecution correspondingly optimistic. It emerged later that one juror, who was resentful about not being chosen as foreman, had been consistently obstructive. But finally, on 31 October (Hallowe’en), the jury announced that it had found Angelo Buono guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner. During the following week they also found him guilty of murdering Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Jane King, Lissa Kastin and Cindy Hudspeth. But—possibly influenced by the fact that Bianchi had already escaped the death penalty—they decided that Buono should not receive a death sentence. On 4 January 1984, the judge ordered that, since he had done everything in his power to sabotage the case against his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi should be returned to serve his sentence in Washington. He then sentenced Angelo Buono to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, regretting that he could not sentence him to death. In his final remarks he told the defendants:
‘I am sure, Mr Buono and Mr Bianchi, that you will both probably only get your thrills reliving over and over again the torturing and murdering of your victims, being incapable, as I believe you to be, of feeling any remorse.’
Asked later whether such acts as Buono and Bianchi had committed did not prove them insane, he commented: ‘Why should we call someone insane simply because he or she chooses not to conform to our standards of civilized behaviour?’
Perhaps more than any other case in this book, this one raises the question: what motivates people to do such things? This is not intended as an expression of moral indignation, which has no place in criminology, but as a question in practical psychology.
To grasp its significance, we need to look back over some of the ground we have covered in discussing the rise of pornography. There is a sense in which sex is not a ‘personal’ relationship, particularly for the male (on whom we are focusing). A healthy male responds ‘automatically’ to certain sights, such as a female undressing, just as a male stickleback will attack a piece of red cardboard because its aggression is aroused by another male’s red underside. An inexperienced teenager may spend much of his time in a state of sexual arousal which is as impersonal as a dog’s response to a bitch in heat. On the other hand, when a husband sees his wife removing her clothes on their honeymoon, his response is a mixture of ‘impersonal’ desire and ‘personal’ tenderness. And, since the purpose of sex is ultimately the raising of children, this is obviously closer to what sex is supposed to be. We all feel instinctively that sex without any ‘personal’ dimension is rather crude and shameful, in that that it leaves some basic human craving unsatisfied.
All human beings experience this desire for human contact and warmth, and this clearly applied to Buono and Bianchi, both of whom had close sexual relationships—albeit Buono preferred underage girls. How, then, could they continue to kidnap, rape and murder girl after girl, without any sense of compunction? Did they never feel sorry for some exhausted, violated victim as she was pleading for her life? If not, then how did they feel when they returned to their ‘normal’ human relations—as Bianchi did with his common-law wife and child?
To say that they ‘divided their minds’ is no answer. We can easily see that a man who began to develop a sadistic pleasure in beating dogs or children would find it difficult to return to being an affectionate master or father.
In this case, we observe—yet again—that rape becomes an addiction. The murder of Yolanda Washington removed their inhibitions about rape/murder, and from then on, the craving returned periodically. It was basically a desire to treat the woman purely as a sexual stimulant, with no personal relationship. Moreover, this also developed into a desire to torture the woman as well as rape her. It is as if treating women as ‘sexual throwaways’ caused the development of some element that may be latent in all males, but about which ‘normal’ males feel a deep inhibition.
What is it that can turn normal males into ruthless sexual predators? A sex-starved adolescent might suppose that it is simply the act of undressing a girl and penetrating her body, which strikes him as infinitely exciting. But a married couple know this is not true. ‘Normal’ sex tends to stay normal, and not to develop into violence and rape.
Roy Hazelwood came close to an answer when he said that sex crime is not about sex but about power. We have seen that this statement needs to be qualified. Some sex crime springs purely out of sexual frustration, and is therefore ‘about sex’. But in the majority of modern serial killers, it is true that sex crime is about power.
But why should that be addictive? In spite of the anarchist dictum that power corrupts, a man who achieves power in everyday life, say as colonel of a regiment or supervisor of an office, does not automatically want to become Commander in Chief or head of the corporation. He may have reached a level at which he feels comfortable. Then why is the kind of power involved in sex crime so addictive?
The answer clearly lies in the sense of revelation associated with sex—the sense of breaking through barriers, of overcoming obstacles, of asserting masculinity: in a word, the surge of freedom. The sex criminal would argue that the average man can never ‘drink his fill’ of sex; he is only allowed to satisfy his desire within certain socially recognized limits. Sex murderer Leonard Lake—whom we shall encounter in the next chapter—expressed this attitude when he wrote: ‘The perfect woman is totally controlled…There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman. There are no frustrations—only pleasure and contentment.’ In drinking his fill of freedom, the sex killer imagines that he will experience total pleasure and contentment, and end with all his problems solved. A particularly articulate serial killer might argue that he regards rape as an instrument of spiritual evolution, just as a saint regards prayer, or a yogi meditation.
All this leads to the most interesting question of all: why, in fact, is there no case on record of a sex killer achieving ‘higher consciousness’ through sex? Why, in fact, do so many of them—like Ian Brady and Ted Bundy—end with a curious sense of futility, of having ‘done it all’? After all, no saint or yogi or artist or philosopher ends with a sense of having ‘done it all’.
The answer lies partly in the fact that man is essentially a social being, and that sex is an activity involving another person. (Even masturbation involves the image of another person.) Sade does his best to argue that the individual has no obligation to society, and can take his satisfaction as straightforwardly as a tiger eating its dinner. But if Sade really meant what he said, he would not bother to present it as an argument, for an argument is presented to other people, and involves the tacit assumption that they have the same rights that you have. No tiger argues with its dinner.
But there is another paradox. The ‘freedom feeling’ involves a sense of expansion, of happiness and benevolence. In sex between lovers, this feeling finds its natural object in the other person. In violation, the act itself contradicts the sensation it arouses. Freedom is about the transcendence of the personality, the ‘godlike’ sensation in which the personality seems to dissolve, to give way to immense vistas of ‘possibility’. By contrast, crime involves entrapment in the personality, a sense of doing something that you prefer other people not to know about. The two sensations are in total opposition, pulling in opposite directions. The sex killer may dream about total fulfilment and higher consciousness, but when he has finished with his victim, he has to think about hiding the body, getting away without being seen, leaving no clues. The prison door has slammed again. Worse still, he feels trapped in a pattern of violence which has become his master. He is like a man who has become enslaved by a blackmailer.
In the 1970s, California became virtually the serial-killer centre of the world. In addition to the Hillside Stranglers, there was John Linley Frazier, Herb Mullin, Ed Kemper and Richard Chase. With the possible exception of Kemper, it could be argued that all four were mentally disturbed to the point of psychosis, and therefore belong in a textbook of psychiatry rather than the present volume. Significantly, California at this time was pursuing a policy of turning out mental patients into the community.
When, in October 1970, Victor Ohta and his family were found murdered in their California home, a note on the doctor’s Rolls-Royce read: ‘Today World War III will begin, as brought to you by the people of the free universe…I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will stop.’ The killer, the 24-year-old drop-out John Linley Frazier, had told witnesses that the Ohta family was ‘too materialistic’ and deserved to die. In fact, Frazier was reacting with the self-centred narcissism of the children described by Becker. (‘You gave him more juice.’ ‘Here’s some more then.’ ‘Now she’s got more juice than me…) He felt he had a long way to go to achieve ‘security’, while Ohta had a swimming pool and a Rolls-Royce parked in the drive.
The irony is that Ohta himself would serve equally well as an example of Becker’s ‘urge to heroism’. He was the son of Japanese immigrants who had been interned in 1941; but Ohta had finally been allowed to join the American army; his elder brother was killed in the fighting in Europe. Ohta had worked as a railway track-layer and a cab driver to get through medical school, and his success as an eye surgeon came late in life. Ohta achieved his sense of ‘belongingness’ through community work; he was one of the founders of the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz—a non-profit-making hospital—and often gave free treatment to patients who could not afford his fees. Frazier was completely unaware of all this. But it would probably have made no difference anyway. He was completely wrapped up in his own little world of narcissism.
In April 1973, 25-year-old Ed Kemper—six foot nine inches tall—crept into his mother’s bedroom and killed her with a hammer; the following day he killed her friend Sara Hallett. Then he drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and rang the Santa Cruz police department to confess. In custody, Kemper confessed to six horrific sex murders, all with a strong necrophiliac element. In 1963, at the age of 14, Kemper had murdered his grandfather and grandmother, with whom he was living, and spent five years in mental hospitals. In 1972, he picked up two female hitch-hikers, threatened them with a gun, and murdered them both; he later dissected the bodies, cutting off the heads. Kemper’s usual method was to take the bodies back to his mother’s house—she worked in a hospital—and rape and dissect them there; he particularly enjoyed having sex with a headless body. The bodies were later dumped over cliffs or left in remote mountain areas. Kemper was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Another psychopathic mass killer, Herb Mullin, was operating in California at the same time as Kemper. As a teenager, Mullin had been voted by his class ‘most likely to succeed’, but by the time he was 21—in 1969—he was showing signs of mental abnormality. In October 1972, driving along a mountain highway, Mullin passed an old tramp, and stopped to ask the man to take a look at the engine; as the man bent over, Mullin killed him with a baseball bat, leaving the corpse by the roadside. Two weeks later he picked up a pretty college student, stabbed her with a hunting knife, and tore out her intestines. In November 1972 he went into a church and stabbed the priest to death. On 25 January 1973, he committed five murders in one night, killing a friend and his wife, then murdering a woman and her two children who lived in a nearby log cabin. In the Santa Cruz State Park he killed four teenage boys in a tent with a revolver. On 13 February 1973, he was driving to his parents’ home when a voice in his head told him to stop and kill an old man who was working in his front garden. A neighbour heard the shot, and rang the police, who picked up Mullin within a few blocks. At his trial, Mullin explained that he was convinced that murders averted natural disasters—such as another San Francisco earthquake. But he was found to be sane and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Richard Chase—who earned himself the soubriquet ‘the Dracula Killer’—was first arrested in August 1977, near Pyramid Lake, Nevada, when police found a raw liver—apparently human—in a plastic bucket in his car. Nearby, Chase—aged 27—was sitting on a rock, half naked and covered in blood. But when tests revealed that the liver was from a cow, Chase was released. If the police had decided to question his sanity, several lives would have been spared.
Four months later, on 29 December 1977, a Sacramento engineer named Ambrose Griffin was shot as he walked between his car and his house—apparently by a random sniper. He died some days later in hospital. The following day, a man sitting in a car fired a handgun at a boy on a bicycle, fortunately missing him. The bullet was found and proved to be fired from the gun that had killed Ambrose Griffin.
On 23 January, an intruder walked into the house of newly married Teresa Wallin, 22, in the Watt Avenue area of Sacramento, and shot her three times, then mutilated the body with a knife. There was no sign of rape, but evidence that the killer had drained some of her blood into a yoghurt cup and drunk it.
Around that time, many people in the area reported seeing a dirty, dishevelled man in an orange jacket, who sometimes knocked on doors and made incomprehensible demands.
Four days later, 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, the mother of two small sons, was found shot and mutilated on her bed, and a boyfriend, Danny Meredith, was found shot dead in the next room. One of her children, 6-year-old Jason, had also been shot. A 22-month-old baby, David Ferreira, whom the victim had been baby-sitting, was missing. Evelyn Miroth’s other two sons were away from home at the time. The post mortem showed that she had been sodomized. Again, there was evidence that the killer had drunk some of her blood.
The following day, a woman named Nancy Holden contacted the police, and told them about an encounter she had had with a man named Richard Chase, on the day of the Wallin murder. Chase, who had been at school with her, had accosted her in a store and tried to persuade her to give him a lift. Worried by his wild appearance, she had made some excuse.
The police checked on Chase and discovered that he had a record of mental illness. When they called at his apartment to interview him, Chase tried to run away; he was finally handcuffed before he could draw a gun.
The body of David Ferreira was found—decapitated—in a box near a church.
On 2 January 1979, Richard Chase was tried on six counts of murder. It became clear from the evidence that one of his peculiarities was to dabble his fingers in the intestines of his victims—hence the nickname ‘the Dracula Killer’. Chase was sentenced to death, but on 26 December 1980, he committed suicide with an overdose of his anti-depression pills, which he had been saving up for weeks.
Oddly enough, it was in England that the most widely publicized case of serial murder of the 1970s occurred. As the years passed without any clue to his identity, ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ achieved the same notoriety as Jack the Ripper in the late nineteenth century. Typically, much of this evaporated with the arrest of the murderer.
On an evening in late August 1969, a prostitute walking down St Paul’s Road, in the red-light area of Bradford, Yorkshire, was struck violently on the head by a brick in a sock. She followed her assailant, and noted the number of the van in which he drove away. The police soon traced the owner of the van, who told them that he had been in the red-light area with a friend, who had vanished down St Paul’s Road late at night. The police went to see the friend, whose name was Peter Sutcliffe. He was a shy, rather inarticulate young man, who insisted that he had only struck the woman with the flat of his hand. Since he had no criminal record, he was let off with a caution. The attack was the first crime of the man who would become known as the Yorkshire Ripper.
This attack was not quite ‘motiveless’. Two months earlier, Sutcliffe had become intensely jealous of his girlfriend, Sonia, who was seeing another man and—he believed—being unfaithful to him. To ‘get even’, he picked up a prostitute—the first time he had ever done such a thing—but the encounter was not a success. The woman took his £10, then got her pimp to chase him away. Three weeks later, he saw the woman in a pub, and demanded his money back; instead, she jeered at him and made him a laughing-stock. Sutcliffe was a shy, sensitive man, and the experience filled him with rage and embarrassment. It festered until he became a sadistic killer of women—innocent housewives and schoolgirls as well as prostitutes.
Five years later, on 4 July 1975, Sutcliffe walked up behind a pretty divorcee named Anna Rogulskyj, and struck her three times on the head with the ball end of a ball-pein hammer. Then, as she collapsed, he raised her blouse and made several slashes with a knife. He was about to plunge it into her stomach when a man’s voice called out to ask what was happening. Sutcliffe fled. Anna Rogulskyj recovered after a brain operation. Six weeks later, on 15 August 1975, he crept behind a 46-year-old office cleaner named Olive Smelt, and struck her to the ground with the hammer. Then he raised her clothes and made some slashes on her buttocks with a hacksaw blade before going to rejoin a friend who was waiting for him in a car. When the friend asked him what he had been doing, he explained in a mumble that he had been ‘talking to that woman’. Olive Smelt also recovered after an operation to remove bone splinters from her brain.
On 29 October 1975, Sutcliffe picked up a 28-year-old prostitute named Wilma McCann, and went with her to a playing field near her home. But he found it impossible to achieve an erection at short notice. When the woman told him he was ‘fuckin’ useless’, he asked her to wait a moment, got the hammer from the toolbox of his car, and struck her on the head. Then he tugged down her white slacks and stabbed her nine times in the abdomen and five in the chest.
Wilma McCann was the first of thirteen murder victims over the course of five years. Some of the victims were ‘amateur prostitutes’, mothers of single-parent families trying to earn money. Some, like 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald, were schoolgirls who happened to be returning home late at night. Some were working women, like 47-year-old Marguerite Walls, a Department of Health official who had been working overtime. Although Sutcliffe was later to insist that he was interested only in killing prostitutes, his craving to kill and mutilate extended to all women.
By the late 1970s, the murder hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (as the press christened him) was the biggest in British criminal history. Thousands of people were interviewed—including Peter Sutcliffe—but all this information was not computerized, and so overwhelmed the investigators. Sutcliffe was interviewed in connection with the murder of a prostitute named Jean Jordan, a 20-year-old Scot, whom he had killed in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester, stripping her naked and stabbing her in a frenzy. After the murder, Sutcliffe looked for her handbag, which contained the £5 note he had given her—a new one he had been paid in his wage packet. In due course, this was found by the police, and all the employees of twenty-five firms in Bradford were interviewed, including Sutcliffe. His wife confirmed his alibi, and the police filed a report saying they had found nothing to arouse their suspicions.
In 1978 and 1979 the police had received three letters signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, which had led them to mount an extensive investigation in the Wearside area, 100 miles to the north of Bradford. And on 26 June 1979, the police received a recorded tape beginning with the words ‘I’m Jack’, and taunting them for failing to catch him; the accent was ‘Geordie’—again, from the Wearside area. After Sutcliffe’s arrest, the letters and the tape were recognized as hoaxes, but at the time, most police officers on the case assumed that the Ripper was from somewhere around Durham.
In December 1980, after the thirteenth murder, the police decided to set up an advisory team consisting of four police officers and a forensic expert, Stuart Kind. There had been seventeen attacks in all—including the ones of Anna Rogulskyj and Olive Smelt, and two more in the autumn of 1979 when the victims survived. The main clues were three sets of tyre tracks at three scenes of crime, three sets of footprints also found near three of the victims, and finally the new £5 note found in Jean Jordan’s handbag. It will be recalled that this had been found far from the sites of the earlier Ripper murders, across the Pennines in Manchester, so it seemed highly likely that the ‘Ripper’ had taken it with him from Bradford—Sutcliffe had received it in his pay packet two days before the murder. But if the Ripper lived in the Bradford area, then the search of Wearside was a waste of time. In that case, the tape was probably also a hoax, for although the ‘Geordie’ Ripper might live in Bradford, the extensive police investigations had failed to pinpoint such a suspect. This is why, at the beginning of the investigation, the five-man team decided that the tape and letters should be dismissed as irrelevancies.
There was another reason. The team had gone to examine all the murder sites, including that of a Bradford University student, Barbara Leach, who was killed returning to her flat in the early hours of the morning. As they were looking at the site, one of the police officers, Commander Ronald Harvey, had one of these sudden hunches that come from years of experience, and he remarked: ‘Chummy lives in Bradford and he did it going home.’ What he was suggesting was that the Ripper lived in this area, and that he killed Barbara Leach on his way home, perhaps after an unsuccessful search for a victim.
The comment impressed Stuart Kind, for surely here was an important point: that a murder committed in the early hours of the morning indicated that the killer was not far from home, whereas a murder committed earlier in the evening suggested that he had driven far from home in search of a victim and had to get back. Anna Rogulskyj had been attacked in Keighley, close to Bradford, at 1.10 in the morning. But Olive Smelt, attacked at 11 p.m., had been in Halifax. Josephine Walker had been murdered in Halifax at 11.30 p.m. Helen Rytka had been attacked in Huddersfield—even further from Bradford—at nine in the evening. Vera Millward had been murdered in Manchester at nine in the evening. Admittedly, this pattern did not hold for all the seventeen attacks—Emily Jackson had been murdered in nearby Leeds at seven in the evening—but it held for most of them.
So it looked as if the Ripper was probably a local man living in Bradford or Leeds, where ten out of seventeen attacks took place. Next, the team took a map of the area, and computed the ‘centre of gravity’ of the attacks. The basic principle was to stick a pin in the seventeen sites, then to take an eighteenth pin, and join it to the other seventeen by lengths of thread, minimizing the amount of thread required. The eighteenth pin proved to be squarely in Bradford. (In fact, the ‘pin test’ was carried out on the forensic laboratory computer.)
The team suggested that a special squad of detectives should concentrate their energies on Bradford. That would involve re-checking all the men in Bradford who had been interviewed. And since the £5 note was the most vital clue so far, the men who had been interviewed in this connection would have been top of the list. Since the police possessed samples of the tyre tracks of the Ripper’s car, it would have been a simple matter to check the tyre tracks of each of these men.
It can be seen that this method should have led infallibly to Peter Sutcliffe, who was by then living with his wife Sonia at 6 Garden Lane, in the Heaton district of Bradford. That it did not do so was due to the simple circumstance that the Yorkshire Ripper was finally arrested within two weeks of the interim report being completed. On 2 January 1981, in the early evening, Peter Sutcliffe drove the 30 or so miles from Bradford to Sheffield, and in the red-light district there, picked up a black prostitute named Olive Reivers, and backed into a drive. She removed her knickers and handed him a condom; he unbuttoned his trousers and struggled uncomfortably across her in the passenger seat. But he was unable to obtain an erection. As he sat beside her again, telling her about his wife’s frigidity, they were dazzled by the lights of a police car which pulled up with its nose to the bonnet of Sutcliffe’s old Rover. Sutcliffe told Olive Reivers to back up his story that she was his girlfriend, and gave his name as Peter Williams. One of the policemen went to the nearest telephone and checked the car’s number plates with the national police computer at Hendon; within two minutes, he had learned that the plates on the Rover actually belonged to a Skoda. Sutcliffe had stolen them from a car scrap-yard and fixed them on with Sellotape, because he knew the police were noting the number plates of cars in red-light areas.
As both policemen escorted Olive Reivers to the police car, Sutcliffe hurried behind a nearby oil storage tank, explaining that he was ‘busting for a pee’, and there managed to dispose of the ball-pen hammer and knife that had been concealed under his seat. The police then took him to Hammerton Road police station. There he revealed that his name was Sutcliffe, and explained that he was using false number plates because his insurance had lapsed and he was due to appear on a drunken driving charge. He was placed in a cell for the night. And at eight o’clock the next morning—Saturday—he was taken to the Ripper Incident Room at Leeds. Here it was immediately noted that the size of his shoe was the same as that of the footprint found at three of the murder sites. When he volunteered the information that he had been among those questioned about the new £5 note, and had also been questioned routinely as a regular visitor to red-light areas, the investigators suddenly became aware that this man could well be the Ripper. When they learned that his car had also been logged in Manchester, it began to look even more likely. Yet there was still no real evidence against Sutcliffe, and after a long day of questioning, during which he had been pleasantly co-operative, the police recognized this lack of evidence. But five and a half years of fruitless search for the Ripper had made them persistent; they decided to hold him for another night. And, back in Sheffield, the policeman who had arrested him heard that he was still being questioned by the Ripper squad. On an impulse, he went back to the oil storage tank where Sutcliffe had urinated. There he found the hammer and knife on a pile of leaves.
When Sutcliffe was told about the find, he admitted that he was the Yorkshire Ripper, then went on to dictate a statement describing his murders in detail.
‘I imagined him to be an ugly hunchback wi’ boils all over his face, somebody who couldn’t get women and resented ’em for that.’ This was the comment of Carl Sutcliffe when he learned that his eldest brother Peter had been changed with being the Yorkshire Ripper. Peter Sutcliffe was not an ugly hunchback; he was strikingly handsome, in a brooding, Elvis Presley sort of way, with black hair and beard and a superb physique. And he had no difficulty getting girls; although a considerate and attentive husband, he seized any opportunity afforded by his wife’s absence to sleep with local girls, and found them more than willing to oblige.
Then why did Peter Sutcliffe commit thirteen particularly sadistic murders? A book on the case which appeared within weeks of his conviction—and which claimed to be an ‘in-depth study of a mass killer’—shed surprisingly little light on the problem. The portrait of the Ripper that emerged seemed to be entirely in terms of negatives. He was not a brutal or resentful or violent person; on the contrary, he was gentle, meditative, courteous and good-tempered. It was practically impossible to provoke him into anger or self-assertion; and this was not due to an iron self-control, but to a genuine sweetness of disposition. He was the sort of person you would have trusted implicitly as a baby-sitter or an escort for your teenage daughter; what is more, you would have been perfectly right to do so. Under normal circumstances, Peter Sutcliffe would not have harmed a fly.
The mystery, of course, is what peculiar pressures turned this quiet man into a maniac who stole up behind women in the dark, smashed in their skulls with blows from a ball-headed hammer, then pulled up their skirts and blouses and carefully inflicted dozens of wounds with a specially sharpened screw-driver. This is a problem that came to obsess the journalist Gordon Burn, and he sought his answers in the Ripper’s home territory—Bingley, near Bradford. The result is a book that will undoubtedly become a classic in the field of investigative criminology.
It was Aldous Huxley, talking about D. H. Lawrence, who commented on the stifling intimacy of working-class family life, an intimacy the middle classes find almost unimaginable. What Huxley could not understand was the curiously stagnant mentality created by this kind of environment. When people live that close together, they come to share one another’s values, one another’s states of mind, just as they would share one another’s germs if they all used the same toothbrush. This is why so many people, born into such an environment, end their lives living just around the corner from the place where they were born. They take it utterly for granted that there is no escape. This also explains the oddly resentful attitude towards people who have ‘made it’; Gordon Burn mentions the hostility that local people seem to feel about John Braine, who was an assistant librarian in Bingley when he wrote Room at the Top.
This is, of course, hard luck on the people who are slightly different, but who lack the energy or passion to heave themselves out of the swamp by brute force. Burn’s book makes it very clear that this was one of the major factors in the Ripper’s inauspicious development.
Peter Sutcliffe was his mother’s first child: a shy, scrawny, miserable little boy who spent hours staring blankly into space. He clung—quite literally—to his mother’s skirts for years after he had learned to walk. At school he was so withdrawn and passive that after his arrest, most of his schoolteachers could not even remember who he was.
The Sutcliffe home was no background for this kind of child. The father, John Sutcliffe, was a dominant extrovert, a bully who was detested by his family—one daughter admits she had dreams of murdering him. The younger brothers shared some of his characteristics; one of them once floored the local boxing champion by punching him in the testicles. The house was always jammed with people, and John Sutcliffe enjoyed ‘feeling up’ any young girls who strayed too close. The atmosphere was heavy with sexuality; even Sutcliffe’s mother, a quiet doormat of a woman, had a love affair with a local police sergeant; the father retaliated by moving in with the deaf and dumb woman a few doors away. Various kinds of illegality were also taken for granted; Sutcliffe senior was arrested for breaking and entering; the second brother was always in and out of jail; some of Peter’s best friends were burglars.
So the pathologically shy boy began to try to develop the characteristics that would make him less of a misfit. He did body-building exercises, learned to walk on his hands, drove at eighty miles an hour in built-up areas, boasted of sleeping with prostitutes. The latter was fantasy; but Sutcliffe was morbidly fascinated by the local red-light districts, and liked to cruise around them, just eyeing the prostitutes. All the same, when he finally found himself a girl, it was a Czech emigrée, who was even shyer than he was, and so plain that even Sutcliffe senior never tried to feel her up.
It was this girl—Sonia—who started the train of events that turned Peter Sutcliffe into sadistic killer. She began having an affair with an Italian who owned a sports car; Sutcliffe was plunged into an agony of jealousy. To revenge himself, he went off to the red-light district to find a woman. Even this turned out to be a flop. He was unable to raise an erection, and the girl swindled him out of five pounds. Worse still, when he saw her later in a pub and asked for his money, she jeered at him and told the story at the top of her voice, so he became a laughing stock.
‘Life being what it is’, said Gauguin, ‘one dreams of revenge.’ Sutcliffe was caught in a peculiar emotional whirlpool, dreaming of sex, of violence, of getting his own back. One day, eating fish and chips in a friend’s mini-van, he thought he saw the prostitute who had swindled him, and slipped out of the van. He was carrying in his pocket a brick inside a sock for precisely this purpose. He hit the woman on the back of the head, then ran back to the van. She succeeded in taking his number, and the next day he was questioned by the police. He convinced them it had been a straightforward quarrel, and the woman decided not to press charges.
For the next five years he kept out of trouble; to begin with, he was working nights. Sonia had gone to London and had a schizophrenic breakdown, and Sutcliffe nursed her back to health; in 1974 they were married. But hatred of prostitutes continued to obsess him. He would stop the car and ask a woman how much she charged, then persuade her to take less. The bargain concluded, he would shout ‘Is that all you’re worth?’, and drive off. If a woman looked like a prostitute he would ask her roughly if she was on the game. It was totally uncharacteristic of the gentle, courteous Peter; but he was turning into a dual personality.
In July 1975 he approached a woman in the red-light district and, when she turned him down, followed her and hit her with a hammer. Then he raised her clothes and took out a knife. A man saw them and called out; Sutcliffe fled. A month later, he was sitting in a pub with a friend when a 45-year-old office cleaner went past; Sutcliffe said ‘I bet you’re on the game’, and received an abusive answer. Later, he saw her in the street, and slipped out of the car. Again he battered her to the ground with the hammer; again he was disturbed and fled.
Two months later, he picked up a drunken prostitute who was thumbing a lift. They went on to a playing field, where he again failed to raise an erection. Then, as he cursed him, she hit her with the hammer, and stabbed her repeatedly in the breast and stomach.
How does a man acquire a taste for disembowelling women? I suspect the answer may be: all too easily. I read Burn’s book on the Ripper on a train journey to London, en route to do a breakfast TV show. On my way back to Paddington, I began to discuss the case with the hire-car driver, Andrew Fowler, who provided me with a hair-raising insight. Fowler told me that he had worked for two years in a slaughterhouse, because it paid so well. He had always been an animal lover, but found that killing cattle could be treated merely as a job. Then, one day, he found that he was beginning to look at horses and dogs with the thought: ‘I wonder what it would be like to kill it…’ He decided that it was time to change his job. Fowler also described to me a slaughterman who was not happy until he was covered from head to foot in blood; once he was in this state, his eyes began to bulge in an odd way…
What seems clear is that Sutcliffe’s obsession, which began as a hatred of prostitutes, soon became a desire to obtain sexual satisfaction by killing any woman. When he murdered Jean Jordan in Manchester in October 1977, he left the body hidden in bushes. Realizing that the five-pound note he had given her might provide a clue to his identity, he went back a week later to look for her handbag. He stripped her, stabbed her repeatedly, then used a piece of glass to open the body from the knee to the shoulder. The stench made him vomit, but he still went on to try to cut off her head with a hacksaw blade. The worm of death and violence had made its home in his sexual nerve. When he killed 16-year-old Jane MacDonald in the middle of a park, he must have known she was not a prostitute. It made no difference; he had conditioned himself to need this ultimate form of rape, and it was impossible to stop. And when, after thirteen murders, he was caught by a random police check, he had even lost count of the number he had committed—he thought it was eleven.
Perhaps the most important point to emerge from Gordon Burn’s book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, is that mass killers like Sutcliffe, Dennis Nilsen, Ian Brady, even Jack the Ripper himself, are not necessarily human monsters, creatures of nightmare, driven by a craving for violence. Sutcliffe was a basically normal person, who slipped into murder as gently and gradually as a child slips into a swimming pool at the shallow end. The morbid craving that drove him to wander round red-light areas, and to spend hours in a waxworks displaying horrible diseases and accidents, can be found in most children, and in far more adults than we would like to believe. Sutcliffe’s problem was that he was more shy, more imaginative, more intelligent, than the people around him, and that in his environment, these qualities were worse than useless. In self-defence, he had to develop opposite qualities. And it was this discordant jumble of primary and secondary qualities, stitched together like a Frankenstein monster, that turned him into the most dangerous man in England. Gordon Burn reveals his insight into the problem when he describes Sutcliffe at his trial as looking like ‘a seaside cabinet doll that has known better days’. But that description has one slight inaccuracy: this particular doll had never known better days.
1 Published by Doubleday, New York, 1981.