On 8 September 1888, Mrs Mary Burridge, of 132 Blackfriars Road, South London, bought the Late Final edition of the evening newspaper The Star, and when she read the headline about the ‘latest horrible murder in Whitechapel’, she collapsed and died of ‘a fit’. There was much the same profound sense of shock and horror in America in the 1970s as news of the murders of Dean Corll, John Gacy, and the Hillside Stranglers was brought home with nauseating immediacy on the television screen. The general feeling was that the world was going downhill like a toboggan on a ski slope and that nothing could stop it. I recall the impact as being very like that of the revelation of the Nazi death camps in the last days of the Second World War, with the piles of skeletal corpses. But in a sense it was worse; because when Hitler died in the Berlin bunker, the world could at least heave a sigh of relief, and feel that the powers of evil had now been defeated. Corll, Gacy and Bundy revealed that they were as active as ever, and that our welfare society was actually nurturing such monsters.
As already noted, the term ‘serial killer’ was coined in the late 1970s by FBI agent Robert Ressler, who worked at the new FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. The Academy—founded by J. Edgar Hoover—had virtually created a new science called ‘psychological profiling’. The study of dozens of murderers had revealed that they left their ‘personality fingerprints’ behind at the scene of the crime—for example, evidence of panic and confusion usually indicated a young offender. For instance, on 2 September 1977, a 14-year-old schoolgirl named Julie Wittmeyer disappeared on the way home from school in Platte City, Kansas. Her clothing—minus her panties—was found in a field a few days later, and her naked and mutilated body the next day. The local police decided to try the new Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico. After studying the evidence, the Unit sent back a ‘profile’ of the offender: that he knew the victim, that he was a sexually frustrated ‘loner’, probably below average intelligence and of more than average physical development, and that his contemporaries probably regarded him as ‘strange’. Police Chief Marion Beeler exclaimed: ‘Sure as shootin’, that’s him’—for the description fitted a youth named Mark Sager. In fact, Sager was found guilty and sentenced to ten years.
Again, in the early 1980s, police in Anchorage, Alaska, were investigating the murder of a number of ‘exotic dancers’ who worked in bars and strip joints. Most had been buried—naked—in shallow graves, and had been shot in the head. One 17-year-old prostitute escaped from a ‘john’ who had chained her up and tortured her, and her description sounded like a wealthy and respected businessman named Robert Hansen, who owned a bakery business. But Hansen seemed to have an excellent alibi. The investigators decided to contact the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, and offer them the evidence on the crimes without going into detail about their suspect. The resulting ‘profile’ convinced them that Hansen could indeed be their man. The friends who had given him an alibi were interviewed, and told that it might cost them two years in jail if they were perjuring themselves. They broke and admitted they were. Hansen was arrested, and a search of his home revealed ‘trophies’ from his victims, and a map dotted with asterisks. This led them to more naked bodies—twenty in all. Hansen then confessed that he drove women out into the woods and asked them for oral sex; if they failed to satisfy him, he made them run naked through the snow, stalking them with a hunting rifle and finally killing them. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
One interesting point emerges from Hansen’s confession. He described how he had killed his first victim when she had asked him for money—he was obsessively mean—and that after murder he was physically sick. Soon afterwards he stabbed to death a prostitute who failed to fellate him satisfactorily. This time he no longer felt sick, but found he was looking back on the murder with pleasure. After that—as with so many serial killers—it became an addiction.
Robert Ressler was consulted in the case of the Sacramento murderer Richard Chase—described in the last chapter. He constructed a ‘profile’ describing the killer as thin and undernourished, slovenly and unkempt, with a history of mental illness, and between 25 and 27 years of age. Chase was caught soon after, and proved to fit Ressler’s profile with astonishing precision.
When Ressler attended various international seminars on crime in the late 1970s, murders like those of ‘Son of Sam’ were described as ‘Stranger Killings’. At a session at the Bramhill police academy, near London, Ressler heard discussions of crimes that came in ‘series’—like rapes, burglaries, arsons and so on. It was after this that Ressler began to refer to ‘serial killers’ (unaware that crime writer John Brophy had used the term ‘serial murderer’ in his book The Meaning of Murder, in 1966.1 The label stuck. And by the early 1980s the general public suddenly became aware of its existence when journalists began writing articles about ‘serial murder’.
What was being discussed in these early articles was not primarily the type of serial murder committed by Corll and Gacy, in which the killer lured victims into his own home, but the notion of killers who wandered around from place to place, killing casually and at random. It was this that made it all so frightening. One policeman was quoted as saying: ‘There may be as many as five hundred of them out there.’ This meant ten to every state in America, or about one to every major city. This was the figure accepted by psychiatrist Joel Norris in his book Serial Killers: The Growing Menace (1988), although another authority, Elliott Leyton, estimated the number at a hundred.
When writing my own book The Serial Killers (with Donald Seaman, 1990), I found myself questioning these figures. It’s true that a few serial killers—like Corll and Gacy—had killed thirty people. But even allowing a conservative ten victims per killer, Norris’s figure would make about five thousand victims a year—roughly a quarter of the total American murder rate. That seemed impossible. Even Leyton’s figure seemed high. So I wrote to FBI agent Gregg McCrary, one of the Quantico team who had given us such generous help with our book, and asked for his own estimate. It was less than fifty, accounting for, at most, a few hundred serial murders per year. So the usual estimate was well over the top, reflecting the journalist’s desire for a bloodcurdling story rather than the true figures.
In the early 1980s the British police were learning the same lessons as their American counterparts. The Yorkshire Ripper case had taught them an important lesson. If suspects, like car number plates, had been fed into a computer, Sutcliffe would probably have been taken in for questioning when he was wearing the boots whose imprint was found beside Jo Whitaker—and three lives would have been saved. A computer would have had no problem storing 150,000 suspects and 22,000 statements. Yet even with the aid of a computer, the task of tracking down a random serial killer like Sutcliffe would have been enormous. It could only display such details as the methods of known sex offenders, and the names of suspects who had been interviewed more than once. In their next major investigation of a serial killer, the Surrey police began with a list of 4,900 sex offenders—which, as it happened, contained the name of the man they were seeking.
The ‘Railway Rapist’ began to operate in 1982; at this stage, two men were involved in sexual attacks on five women on or near railway stations. By 1984, one of the men had begun to operate alone. He threatened his victims with a knife, tied their hands, and raped them with a great deal of violence. Twenty-seven such attacks occurred in 1984 and 1985. In January 1986, the body of 19-year-old Alison Day was found in the River Lea; she had vanished seventeen days earlier on her way to meet her boyfriend. She had been raped and strangled. In April 1986, 15-year-old Maartje Tamboezer, daughter of a Dutch oil executive, was accosted as she took a short cut through woods near Horsley, and dragged off the footpath; she was also raped and strangled. Her attacker was evidently aware of the most recent advance in forensic detection, ‘genetic fingerprinting’, by which a suspect can be identified from the distinctive pattern in the DNA of his body cells. The killer had stuffed a burning paper handkerchief into her genitals. A man who had been seen running for a train soon after the murder was believed to be the rapist, and two million train tickets were examined in an attempt to find one with his fingerprints.
A month later, a 29-year-old secretary named Ann Lock disappeared on her way home from work; her body was found ten weeks later. Again, an attempt to destroy sperm traces by burning was found.
It was at this point that the police forces involved in the investigation decided to link computers; the result was the list of 4,900 sex offenders, soon reduced to 1,999. At number 1,594 was a man called John Duffy, charged with raping his ex-wife and attacking her lover with a knife. The computers showed that he had also been arrested on suspicion of loitering near a railway station. (Since the blood group of the Ann Lock strangler had been the same as that of the ‘Railway Rapist’, police had been keeping a watch on railway stations.) Duffy was called in for questioning, and his similarity to the ‘Railway Rapist’ noted. (Duffy was small, ginger-haired and pockmarked.) But when the police tried to conduct a second interview, Duffy was in hospital suffering from amnesia, alleging that he had been beaten up by muggers. The hospital authorities declined to allow him to be interviewed. And since he was only one of two thousand suspects, the police did not persist.
Faced with these problems, the investigation team decided that an ‘expert’ might be able to help. They asked Dr David Canter, a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey, to review all the evidence. Using techniques similar to those used by the Yorkshire Ripper team—studying the locations of the attacks—he concluded that the ‘centre of gravity’ lay in the North London area, and that the rapist probably lived within three miles of Finchley Road. He also concluded that he had been a semi-skilled worker, and that his relationship with his wife had been a stormy one. When Canter’s analysis was matched up against the remaining suspects, the computer immediately threw up the name of John Duffy, who lived in Kilburn. Police kept him under surveillance until they decided that they could no longer take the risk of leaving him at liberty—another schoolgirl had been raped with typical violence since Duffy was committed to hospital—and arrested him. When a fellow martial arts enthusiast admitted that Duffy had persuaded him to beat him up so he could claim loss of memory, the police were certain that he was the man they were seeking. Five of the rape victims picked him out at an identity parade, and string found in the home of his parents proved to be identical with that which had been used to tie Maartje Tamboezer’s wrists. When forensic scientists matched fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibres found on one of Duffy’s sweater, the final link in the chain of evidence was established; although he continued to refuse to admit or deny his guilt, John Duffy was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Dr David Canter has described the techniques he used to pinpoint where the railway rapist lived:
Many environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that people form particular mental maps of the places they use. Each person creates a unique representation of the place in which he lives, with its own particular distortions. In the case of John Duffy, journalists recognized his preference for committing crimes near railway lines to the extent that they dubbed him the ‘railway rapist’. What neither they nor the police appreciated was that this characteristic was likely to be part of his way of thinking about the layout of London, and so was a clue to his own particular mental map. It could therefore be used to see where the psychological focus of this map was and so specify the area in which he lived.2
By the time John Duffy was arrested in 1985, the techniques of ‘psychological profiling’ had already—as we have seen—been in use in America for a decade. And the use of the computer had also been recognized as a vital part of the method. A retired Los Angeles detective named Pierce Brooks had pointed out that many serial killers remained unapprehended because they moved from state to state, and that before the state police realized they had a multiple killer on their hands, he had moved on. The answer obviously lay in linking up the computers of individual states, and feeding the information into a central computer. Brooks’s programme was labelled VICAP—the violent criminal apprehension programme—and the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, was chosen as the centre for the new crimefighting team. VICAP proved to be the first major step towards the solution of the problem of the random sex killer.
In France, unfortunately, the technical resources of the police remained relatively primitive well into the 1980s, which explains why a serial killer who created in Paris the same atmosphere of terror as the Yorkshire Ripper in the north of England was able to remain undetected for so many years.
On 5 October 1984, 91-year-old Germaine Petitot was attacked in her home in the Clichy area by two robbers, and left bound and gagged. She had also been beaten, an unnecessary act of violence that puzzled the police, since she was obviously too old to put up any resistance. Unfortunately, she was too shocked to be able to describe her attackers.
Later the same day, 83-year-old Anna Barbier-Ponthus was inserting her key in her door in the rue Saulnier when she was attacked, pushed inside, and suffocated with a pillow. Her body, gagged and bound, was found soon afterwards. Like the previous victim she had also been beaten. In neither case was there any sign of sexual assault. The motive had been robbery—in this case, to take about £40 from her purse.
Four days later, on 9 October, firemen called to a blaze in the rue Nicolet found the body of Suzanne Foucault, 89, who had been suffocated with a plastic bag. Her watch and some money were missing.
Four weeks passed without further attacks; then, in five days, five more old ladies were murdered. On 3 November 1984, a retired schoolteacher, Iona Seigaresco, 71, was found brutally battered; this time the killers had escaped with 10,000 francs (over £1,000) in bonds. She was found two days later. Alice Benaim, found by her son on 7 November, had been forced to drink caustic soda and strangled. The next day, 80-year-old Marie Choy was found tied up with wire, her skull fractured. The next day again, 75-year-old Maria Mico-Diaz was killed and robbed. Five days later, on 12 November, two bodies were found—those of Jean Laurent, 82, and Paule Victoire, 77; medical evidence showed that these had died about a week earlier.
There had been eight murders in a month, and in every case, the violence had been disproportionate; this was obviously a killer—or killers—who hated old women. The press soon labelled him ‘the phantom’. There was a public outcry; riot squads patrolled the XVIIIth arrondissement, and all pensioners in the area were asked to attend a meeting at the Town Hall, where politicians made speeches and tried to sound reassuring.
The meeting seemed effective in frightening the ‘phantom’. The murders ceased. The police worked as hard as ever, but they had no clues. The fingerprints they had found at the crime scenes matched those of no known offender.
Thirteen months later, the murders began again, although not in the same arrondissement. On 20 December 1985, the body of 91-year-old Estelle Donjoux was found in the Observatoire area. On 4 January 1986, Andrée Ladam, 77, was strangled and robbed; on 9 January, Yvonne Couronne, 83, was killed in her home. For their relatives, the only consolation was that the marks of sadistic beatings were absent.
Between 12 and 15 January, three more women—Marjem Jurblum, 81, Françoise Vendôme, 83, and Yvonne Schaible, 77—were killed, bringing the total up to fourteen. Virginie Labrette, 76, found on 31 January, made fifteen.
There was a five-month break until 14 June 1986, when Ludmiller Liberman, an American widow, was killed in her home in Passy. Then, once more, another long break until late November 1987, when Rachel Cohen, 79, was killed in Entrepot; on the same day, 87-year-old Mme Finalteri was found close by in the rue D’Alsace. But now, at last, the police seemed to have a break; Madame Finalteri was just alive. The killer had suffocated her with a mattress and left her for dead.
While police waited by her bed, Genevieve Germont, 73, was suffocated in a room in nearby rue Cail. Although no one knew it, this was the last murder by the ‘phantom’. A few days later, Mme Finalteri was able to give a description of her attacker: a tall half-caste with dyed blond hair and ear-ring. On 1 December 1987, Police Superintendent Francis Jacob saw a young man answering this description in the Entrepot area. He asked to see his identity papers, and the man—who seemed untroubled at being questioned—gave his name as Thierry Paulin, 24. As soon as he was taken in for questioning, Paulin’s career as a killer of old women was over; his fingerprints matched those of the ‘phantom’. Paulin quickly confessed to twenty murders, and implicated his lover, Jean-Thierry Mathurin.
Paulin had been born in 1963 on the Caribbean island of Martinique, child of a white father, Gaby Paulin, and a West Indian mother, who was only 17 at the time. She soon farmed him out to his white grandmother, but she was too busy running a restaurant to give the child much attention. When he was 9, he returned to his mother’s home in the capital, Fort-de-France—she had now remarried—but his stepfather found the child violent and difficult. He was sent to live with his father in Toulouse. But Gaby Paulin found him just as difficult, as well as disappointingly effeminate. When he was 18 Paulin began his military service; home on leave two years later, he threatened an old woman who ran a grocer’s shop with a butcher’s knife and got away with nearly £200. Arrested soon after, he explained that he had wanted to buy some expensive clothes with the money; he was placed on probation.
After military service he went to Paris and joined the gay community. He worked at the Paradis Latin, which specialized in transvestite revues, and met Jean-Thierry Mathurin, also 21, who came from Guyana; the two became lovers. Paulin’s mother came to see the revue and was so shocked at the sight of her son in women’s clothes that she left before the end.
After a violent scene in a restaurant with his lover, Paulin lost his job. Short of money, the two men attacked their first victim, Germaine Petitot, following her into her apartment. She survived, and if she had been able to give the police a description of her attackers, the crimes might have ceased there and then. But she was traumatized, and four days later, the ‘phantom’ murders began.
Paulin’s hatred of elderly white women was almost certainly based on dislike of his grandmother, and in the course of the first eight murders, this hatred was given full reign. Then, after the eighth murder in November 1984, Paulin and Mathurin decided that Paris had become too hot to hold them, and moved south to Toulouse, moving in with Paulin’s father. But the old antagonism remained, and soon Mathurin moved back to Paris. Paulin, using the money he had acquired from the robberies, set out to try and launch a business as an agency for transvestite revues. He had considerable charm, dressed well, and was a persuasive talker. But by the following November, he was tired of provincial Toulouse, and moved back to Paris and his lover. Now the new series of murders began. Meanwhile, Paulin found himself a job in a theatrical agency called Frulatti, and handled contracts for photographers and models. He became something of a young businessman-about-town, and no one suspected that a large part of his income came from murder. But a huge transvestite party he organized—called ‘A Look into Hell’—bankrupted Frulatti.
In August 1986, Paulin was jailed for beating up a cocaine dealer—by now he was himself dealing in drugs—and spent a year behind bars. But the French computer system was too inefficient to identify his fingerprints with that of the ‘phantom’. And so he emerged in 1987 to kill more. He celebrated his 24th birthday with an enormous party, sending out printed invitations and providing champagne; it gave him great satisfaction that it took place in a restaurant in Les Halles where he had worked as a waiter during thin times in 1985. Four days later he was arrested.
Paulin’s coldness about his victims baffled psychiatrists; he obviously felt no more compunction about slaughtering elderly ladies than a butcher does about killing sheep.
Paulin was charged with eighteen of his twenty murders, but he never came to trial. An X-ray revealed that he was suffering from lesions on the brain (like so many serial killers), and it soon became clear that he was also suffering from Aids. In March 1989 he was rushed to hospital, where he fell into a coma; on the 16th of the following month, he died. At the time of writing, Mathurin is still awaiting trial.
England’s equivalent of the Paulin case was solved rather more quickly. In April 1986, it became clear that a killer of old people was operating in South London. (The police even considered the possibility that the ‘phantom’ had moved across the Channel.) The first victim, 78-year-old Eileen Emms, was an ex-schoolteacher who lived alone in her basement flat in Wandsworth. When she was found dead in bed on 9 April 1986, it was at first assumed that she had died of natural causes; then someone noticed that her television set was missing. Closer examination revealed that she had been strangled and raped. On 9 June, 67-year-old Janet Crockett was strangled in her flat in Overton Road, Stockwell. On 27 June, the killer entered an old people’s home in Stockwell and tried to strangle 73-year-old Frederick Prentice. After three unsuccessful attempts to subdue the struggling man, the intruder fled when Prentice pressed the alarm buzzer. But the following night, he returned and strangled two residents at the same home: 94-year-old Zbigniew Stabrawa, and 84-year-old Valentine Gleim, who was also sodomized.
The ‘Stockwell Strangler’—as the press now called him—moved to Islington, North London, to kill 82-year-old William Carmen on 8 July 1986, whom he also sodomized. He also stole £500. On 12 July, the strangler killed 75-year-old Trevor Thomas in Clapham. Then he returned to the scene of his second murder, and strangled and sodomized William Downes, 74, in Overton Road, Stockwell. Finally, on 1986, he strangled and raped half-blind and disabled Florence Tisdall, 80, in her flat in Fulham.
The breakthrough came when a palm print found at the scene of the Downes murder was identified in the files as that of 23-year-old Kenneth Erskine, who had a lengthy record of burglaries. He proved to be registered with a Department of Health and Social Security office in Southwark, and was arrested on 28 July when he went to collect his benefit. He proved to have a building society account with £350 in it. Erskine was a half-caste—with a white mother and Antiguan father—who seemed to share with Paulin a pathological hatred of old people. He had a mental age of only 11, and a history of violence, attempting to drown fellow pupils in the school swimming pool and attacking a nurse with a pair of scissors. For the past seven years he had been a drifter who slept rough, lived by petty crime, and took drugs. Erskine—who is believed to have committed at least two more murders—received seven life sentences, and twelve years for the attempted murder of Frederick Prentice.
It was in 1963 that the American public became aware of the ‘wandering serial killer’, through the arrest of a murderer who seemed to embody everybody’s worst nightmares. Over a period of months, a drifter named Henry Lee Lucas confessed to committing over three hundred and sixty murders. Pedro Lopez, the ‘Monster of the Andes’, had confessed to killing and raping about three hundred and fifty underage girls in Ecuador and Columbia. And in 1986, while the newspapers were still full of stories about Lucas, another South American killer, Daniel Camargo Barbosa, confessed to killing seventy-two women and girls in Ecuador in the course of that year. But with his ‘more than three hundred and sixty’, Lucas seemed to be far and away the worst serial killer in American history—in fact, in world history.
The story that was to make world headlines began in the early hours of 15 June 1983, when Joe Don Weaver, the jailer on duty in the Montague County Jail, Texas, was startled by loud shouts coming from one of the cells. Weaver rushed down the hallway.
‘What do you want?’
‘There’s a light in here,’ said Henry Lee Lucas in a quavering voice.
‘No there’s not.’ In fact, the cell was in pitch darkness.
‘There’s a light. And it’s talking to me.’
‘You’re seeing things,’ said Weaver, ‘Shut up and get some sleep.’ He made his way back to the office.
Lucas was a little man—five feet eight inches tall and of slight build—who was in jail for a minor weapons offence; he was also suspected of two murders. Only three nights before, Weaver had found him hanging in his cell, with blood dripping from slashed wrists. After a couple of days in a prison hospital, Lucas had been moved to a special cell in the women’s section, where he could be kept under closer observation. But he had looked sick and miserable, and Weaver was not surprised that he was having hallucinations.
Another yell echoed down the hall.
‘Jailer! Come here, quick!’
Weaver peered in through the aperture in the food-service door known as the ‘bean hole’.
‘What the hell is it this time?’
There was a long pause, and then Lucas spoke in a sad, quiet voice.
‘Joe Don, I done some pretty bad things.’
Weaver said sternly: ‘If it’s what I think it is, Henry, you better get on your knees and pray.’
There was another long pause, then Lucas said: ‘Joe Don, can I have some paper and a pencil?’
Half an hour later, Lucas handed the letter out through the bean hole. It was addressed to Sheriff Bill F. Conway, and began:
‘I have tryed to get help for so long, and no one will believe me. I have killed for the past ten years and no one will believe me. I cannot go own [sic] doing this. I allso killed The only Girl I ever loved…
Weaver hurried to the telephone. He had no hesitation about waking Sheriff Conway in the middle of the night. This, he knew, was the break Conway had been waiting for.
The unshaven, smelly little vagrant who now waited in his dark cell had been a hard nut to crack. Since the previous September, he had been suspected of killing an 80-year-old widow named Kate Rich, who had vanished from her home; Sheriff Conway had learned that she had been employing an odd-job man called Henry Lee Lucas, together with his common-law wife, 15-year-old Becky Powell. Lucas had left Mrs Rich’s employment under a cloud, and gone to live in a local religious commune. Not long after that, Becky had also disappeared.
Sheriff ‘Hound Dog’ Conway had arrested Lucas in the previous October, and questioned him for days. Lucas was a coffee addict and a chain smoker; but even when deprived of these drugs, he refused to crack. He insisted that he knew nothing about the disappearance of Kate Rich. As to Becky Powell, he claimed that she had run off with a truck driver when they were trying to hitch-hike back to her home in Florida. He had passed several lie-detector tests, and the sheriff had finally been forced to let him go.
A week ago, the situation had changed. The Rev. Reuben Moore, the man who ran the House of Prayer where Lucas lived, had mentioned that Lucas had given his wife a gun for safe keeping. That was against Texas law, for Henry Lee Lucas was an ex-convict, and therefore not entitled to own a gun. The excuse was good enough, and Sheriff Conway had arrested the little tramp again. Once again Conway tried the effect of depriving him of coffee and cigarettes. The first result had been the suicide attempt. But now, it seemed, the technique had worked; Lucas was confessing to the murder of Becky Powell.
A few hours later, Henry Lee Lucas sat in Sheriff Conway’s office, a large pot of black coffee and a packet of Lucky Strikes in front of him. He was a strange-looking man, with a glass eye, a thin, haggard face, and a loose, downturned mouth like a shark. When he smiled, he showed a row of rotten, tobacco-stained teeth. In the small office, his body odour was overpowering.
‘Henry,’ said the sheriff kindly, ‘You say in this note you want to tell me about some murders.’
‘That’s right. The light told me I had to confess my sins.’
‘The light?’ Conway knew Lucas had smashed the bulb in his cell.
‘There was a light in my cell, and it said: “I will forgive you, but you must confess your sins.” So that’s what I aim to do.’
Lucas looked sane enough; after the coffee and cigarettes, he sounded calm and lucid. Conway hid his doubts and said:
‘Tell me what you did to Kate Rich.’
‘All right I drove to her house…’
‘Do you mind if I tape record this?’
‘Go ahead. I left the House of Prayer around six in the evening, and drove to her house in Ringgold…’
What followed was a chillingly detailed confession—Lucas seemed to have total recall—of the murder of the 80-year-old woman and the violation of her dead body. Lucas described how he had gone to Kate Rich’s house and offered to take her to church. She had asked him questions about the disappearance of his ‘wife’ Becky Powell, and at some point, Lucas had decided to kill her. He had taken the butcher’s knife that lay between them on the bench seat of the old car, and suddenly jammed it into her left side. The knife entered her heart and she had collapsed immediately. Then, speaking as calmly as if he was narrating some everyday occurrence, Lucas described how he had dragged her down an embankment, then undressed and raped her. After that, he dragged her to a wide section of drainpipe that ran under the road, and stuffed the body into it. Later, he had returned with two plastic garbage bags, and used them as a kind of makeshift shroud. He buried her clothes nearby. Then he drove back to his room in the House of Prayer, made a huge fire in the stove, and burned the body. The few bones that were left he buried in the compost heap outside.
Sheriff Conway showed no emotion as he listened to this lengthy and detailed recital. By the time it was over, they were both tired. And now he had confessed, Lucas had ceased to look pale and harassed. Whether or not he had been telling the truth about the ‘light’, he was obviously relieved to be talking frankly.
Later that day, together with another colleague—Texas Ranger Phil Ryan, who had also been working on the case—they again sat in Conway’s office, with the tape recorder running. Conway asked him what had happened to Becky Powell. This time the story was longer, and Lucas’s single eye often overflowed with tears. By the time it was over, both Conway and Ryan were trying to hide their feeling of nausea.
Lucas had met Becky Powell in 1978, when she was 11 years old; she was the niece of his friend Ottis Toole, and Lucas was staying at the home of her great aunt in Jacksonville, Florida. Becky’s full name was Frieda Lorraine Powell, and she was slightly mentally retarded. Even at 11 she was not a virgin. The family situation was something of a sexual hothouse. Ottis Toole had been seduced by his elder sister Drusilla when he was a child. He grew up bisexual, and liked picking up lovers of both sexes—including Henry Lee Lucas. And he liked watching his pick-ups make love to Becky or her elder sister Sarah.
Ottis had another peculiarity; he liked burning down houses because it stimulated him sexually.
In December 1981, Becky’s mother Drusilla committed suicide, and she and her younger brother Frank were placed in juvenile care. Lucas decided to ‘rescue’ her, and in January 1982, he and Ottis fled with Becky and Frank; they lived on the proceeds of robbery—mostly small grocery stores. Lucas felt heavily protective about Becky, he explained, and she called him ‘Daddy’. But one night, as he was saying goodnight to her, and he was making her shriek with laughter by tickling her, they began to kiss. Becky had raised no objection as he undressed her, then himself. After that, the father-daughter relation changed into something more like husband and wife. At 12, Becky looked as if she was 19.
But in the House of Prayer, in 1982, Becky had suddenly become homesick, and begged him to take her back to Florida. Reluctantly, Henry agreed; they set out hitch-hiking. Later, in the warm June night, they settled down with blankets in a field. But when they began arguing about her decision to go home, Becky had lost her temper and struck him in the face. Instantly, like a striking snake, Lucas grabbed a carving knife that lay nearby, and stabbed her through the heart. After that he had violated her body. And then, since the ground was too hard to dig a grave, he cut her into nine pieces with the carving knife, then scattered the pieces in the thick undergrowth. The next day, he hitch-hiked back to the House of Prayer, and told them that Becky had run away with a truck driver. His sorrow was obviously so genuine that everyone sympathized. In fact, Lucas told the law men, he felt as if he had killed a part of himself.
The two policemen felt exhausted, and the night was half over. Ryan asked wearily:
‘Is that all?’
Lucas shook his head. ‘Not by a long way. I reckon I killed more’n a hundred people.’
Conway and Ryan were experienced policemen, who had heard many confessions. But this one left them shaken and incredulous. If Lucas was telling the truth, he was far and away the worst mass murderer in American criminal history. But was he telling the truth? Or was he merely suffering from hallucinations?
The first step was to check his story about Kate Rich. Lucas had pointed out the spot on a map. Still dazed from lack of sleep, Conway and Ryan drove there in the darkness. They quickly located the wide drainage pipe that ran under the road. Lying close to its entrance was a pair of knickers, of the type that would be worn by an old lady. There was also a length of wood; Lucas had told them he had used a similar piece to shove the body deeper into the culvert. On the other wide of the road, they also found broken lenses from a lady’s glasses.
In the House of Prayer, near Stoneburg, they looked into the unutterably filthy room that Lucas had occupied in a converted chicken barn, and in the stove, found fragments of burnt flesh, and some pieces of bone. On the rubbish heap they found more bone fragments.
Later that day, they drove to Denton, a college town north of Dallas, where Lucas said he had killed Becky Powell. This time, Lucas accompanied them. In a field fifty yards off the main highway, in a grove of trees, they found a human skull, a pelvis, and various body parts in an advanced stage of decomposition. Becky’s orange suitcase still lay nearby, and articles of female clothing and make-up were strewn around.
So far, it was obvious that Lucas had been telling the truth; he had killed Becky and Kate Rich just as he had described. But what about all the other victims he had mentioned?
Even after killing Becky, Lucas told them, he had murdered another woman. Telling the Rev. Reuben Moore that he was going off to look for Becky, Lucas had drifted to California, then down to New Mexico, then north again to Decatur, Illinois, where he had tried to find work as a labourer. Since he had no identification, he was turned down. A truck gave him a lift to a truck-driver’s eatery in Missouri, and there he saw a young woman waiting by the pumps for petrol. He went up to her, pushed a knife into her ribs, and told her he needed a lift, and would not harm her. Without speaking, she allowed him to climb into the driver’s seat. All that night he drove south towards Texas, until the woman finally fell into a doze. Lucas had no intention of keeping his promise. He wanted money—and sex. Just before dawn he pulled off the road, and as the woman woke up, plunged the knife into her throat. Then he pushed her out on to the ground, cut off her clothes and violated the body. After that, he dragged it into a grove of trees, took the money from her handbag, and drove the car to Fredericksburg, Texas, where he abandoned it.
Lucas was unable to tell them the woman’s name, but his description of the place where he abandoned the car offered a lead. In fact, the Texas Rangers near Fredericksburg were able to confirm the finding of an abandoned station wagon in the previous October. And a little further checking revealed that the police at Magnolia, Texas, had found the naked body of a woman with her throat cut, at about the same time. Again, it was clear that Lucas was telling the truth.
On 17 June 1983, two days after he had started to confess, Henry Lee Lucas appeared in the Montague County Courthouse, accused of murder and of possessing an illegal firearm. A Grand Jury indicted him on both counts.
The following day, in the press room of the Austin Police Department, a bored reporter named Mike Cox was talking casually to a police lieutenant when the lieutenant mentioned that he had heard rumours of a man in north Texas who had been murdering women for sex. Cox did some telephoning, and learned that the man, Henry Lee Lucas, was about to be arraigned in the Montague County Courthouse. It sounded unpromising, but since there was nothing else to do…
The following day, Tuesday 21 June 1983, Mike Cox was in the courtroom when the unimpressive little man who looked like an out-of-work roadsweeper was led in between two deputies. The only other reporters in court were from the nearby Wichita Falls television station, who intended to put out an item on their local news. From all appearances, it looked as if the arraignment would take only a matter of minutes.
When Judge Frank Douthitt had heard the indictment concerning Kate Rich, he asked the prisoner if he understood the seriousness of the indictment against him. Lucas replied quietly:
‘Yes, sir. I have about a hundred of them.’
It was said so casually that for a moment Cox failed to grasp its significance. Was this man really saying he had killed a hundred people? Yes, apparently he was, for the judge was now asking him if he had ever had a psychiatric examination. The little man replied in the affirmative. ‘I tell them my problems and they didn’t want to do anything about it…I know it ain’t normal for a person to go out and kill girls just to have sex with them.’
Moments later, as Lucas was led out of court, Cox rushed over to District Attorney McGaughey. How many murders was Lucas suspected of? The DA was cautious. He had told the police about seven so far. ‘But there’s still a lot of work to be done. He may be spinning yarns.’
The following morning, the Austin newspapers carried headlines which were a variant on: DRIFTER CONFESSES TO A HUNDRED MURDERS. The wire services immediately picked up the story, and by evening it was on front pages all over the country.
For the past ten years, the American public had been kept in a state of shock at the revelations about mass murderers who had killed an unprecedented number of victims. Cases like that of Ted Bundy made it clear that one of the major problems was simply how to detect a ‘wandering’ killer, who might not be recognized for what he was because of lack of police co-operation between various states. In November 1982, while Henry Lee Lucas was still at large, a meeting of police from all over the country decided to establish a national crime computer, into which details of every homicide would be automatically fed. This became known as the NCAVC, the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
And now, just over six months later, the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas made it clear that the NCAVC had been formed not a moment too soon. The ‘wandering killer’ was obviously a new type of menace. Suddenly, every newspaper in America was talking about serial killers.
Meanwhile, the cause of all this excitement was sitting in his jail cell in Montague County, describing murder after murder to a ‘task force’ headed by Sheriff Jim Boutwell and Texas Ranger Bob Prince. It soon became clear that a large number of these murders had not been committed on his own, but in company with his lover Ottis Elswood Toole.
Toole, who had a gap in his front teeth and a permanent stubble on his chin, looked even more like a tramp than Lucas. And even before Lucas was arrested in Montague County, Toole was in prison in his home town, Jacksonville. He was charged with setting fires in Springfield, the area where he lived. On 5 August 1983, he was sentenced to fifteen years for arson.
One week later, in a courtroom in Denton County—where he had killed Becky Powell—Lucas staggered everybody by pleading not guilty to Becky’s murder. He was, in fact, beginning to play a game that would become wearisomely familiar to the police: withdrawing confessions. It looked as if, now he was in prison, the old Henry Lee Lucas, the Enemy of Society, was reappearing. He could no longer kill at random when he felt the urge, but he could still satisfy his craving for control over victims by playing with his captors like a cat with mice.
It did him no good. On 1 October 1983, in the courtroom where he had been arraigned, Lucas was sentenced to seventy-five years for the murder of Kate Rich. And on 8 November 1983, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Becky Powell. Before the courts had finished with him, he would be sentenced to another seventy-five years, four more life sentences, and a further sixty-six years, all for murder. For good measure, he was also sentenced to death.
When Henry Lee Lucas began confessing to murders, it seemed to be a genuine case of religious conversion. Later, when he was moved to the Georgetown Jail in Williamson County, he was allowed regular visits from a Catholic laywoman who called herself Sister Clementine, and they spent hours kneeling in prayer. He was visited by many lawmen from all over the country, hoping that he could clear up unsolved killings. Sometimes—if he felt the policeman failed to treat him with due respect—he refused to utter a word. At other times, he confessed freely. The problem was that he sometimes confessed to two murders on the same day, in areas so wide apart that he could not possibly have committed both. This tendency to lie at random led many journalists to conclude that Lucas’s tales of mass murder were mostly invention.
None of the officers who knew him closely believed that for a moment. Too many of his confessions turned out to be accurate.
For example, on 2 August 1983, when he was being arraigned for the murder of a hitch-hiker known simply as ‘Orange Socks’, Lucas was taken to Austin to be questioned about another murder. On the way there, seated between two deputies, Lucas pointed to a building they passed and asked if it had been a liquor store at one time. The detectives looked at one another. It had, and it had been run by a couple called Harry and Molly Schlesinger, who had been robbed and murdered on 23 October 1989. Lucas admitted that he had been responsible, and described the killings with a wealth of detail that only the killer could have known. He then led the deputies to a field where, on 8 October 1979, the mutilated body of a girl called Sandra Dubbs had been found. He was also able to point out where her car had been left. There could be no possible doubt that Lucas had killed three people in Travis County in two weeks.
When asked if Ottis Toole had committed any murders on his own, Lucas mentioned a man in his fifties who had died in a fire set by Toole in Jacksonville. Toole had poured petrol on the man’s mattress and set it alight. Then they had hidden and watched the fire engines; a 65-year-old man was finally carried out, badly burned. He had died a week later. Police assumed he had accidentally set the mattress on fire with a cigarette.
Lucas’s description led the police to identify the victim as George Sonnenberg, who had been fatally burned in a fire on 4 January 1982. Police drove out to Raiford Penitentiary to interview Toole. He admitted it cheerfully. When asked why he did it, he grinned broadly. ‘I love fires. Reckon I started a hundred of them over the past several years.’
There could be no possible doubt about it. Toole and Lucas had committed a number of murders between them. At one point, Lucas insisted that the total was about 360—he went on to detail 175 committed alone, and 65 by himself and Ottis Toole.
In prison after his original convictions. Lucas seemed a well satisfied man. Now much plumper, with his rotten teeth replaced or filled, he had ceased to look so sinister. He had a special cell all to himself in Sheriff Boutwell’s jail—other prisoners had treated him very roughly during the brief period he had been among them, and he had to be moved for his own safety. But he was now a national celebrity. Magazines and newspapers begged for interviews, television cameras recorded every public appearance. Police officers turned up by the dozen to ask about unsolved murder cases, and were all warned beforehand to treat Lucas with respect, in case he ceased to co-operate. Now, at least, he was receiving the attention he had always craved, and he revelled in it. And some visitors, like the psychiatrist Joel Norris, the journalist Mike Cox—who had filed the original story on Lucas—and the crime writer Max Call, came to interview him in order to learn about his life, and to write books about it. Lucas co-operated fully with Call, who was the first to reach print—as early as 1985—with a strange work called Hand of Death.
Here, for the first time, the American public had an opportunity to satisfy its morbid curiosity about Lucas’s rampage of crime. The story that emerged lacked the detail of later studies, but it was horrific enough.
Lucas, Call revealed, had spent most of his life from 1960 to 1975 in jail. After his release he had an unsuccessful marriage—which broke up when his wife realized he was having sex with her two small girls—and lived for a while with his sister Wanda, leaving when she accused him of sexually abusing her young daughter. He seems to have met Ottis Toole in a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1978. Ottis had a long prison record for car stealing and petty theft, and he invited Lucas back home, where he was soon regarded as a member of the family.
According to Lucas, he had already committed a number of casual murders as he wandered around. These were mostly crimes of opportunity—as when he offered a lift to a girl called Tina Williams, near Oklahoma City, after her car had broken down. He shot her twice and had intercourse with the body. Police later confirmed Lucas’s confession.
Even so, the meeting with Toole seems to have been a turning point. Now, according to both of them, they began killing ‘for fun’. According to Toole’s confession, they saw a teenage couple walking along the road on November 1978, their car having run out of fuel. Lucas forced the girl into the car, while Toole shot the boy in the head and chest. Then, as Toole drove, Lucas raped the girl repeatedly in the back of the car. Finally, Toole began to feel jealous, and when they pulled up, shot the girl six times, and left her body by the road. The police were also able to confirm this case: the youth was called Kevin Key, the girl Rita Salazar. The man in charge of the murder investigation was Sheriff Jim Boutwell, and the case was the first of more than a score of similar murders along the Interstate 35 Highway that kept him busy for the next five years. The victims included teenage hitch-hikers, elderly women abducted from their homes, tramps and men who were killed for robbery. Lucas was later to confess to most of these crimes.
Lucas and Toole began robbing ‘convenience stores’, forcing the proprietor or store clerk into the back. Lucas described how, on one occasion, they tied up the young girl, but she continued to try to get free. So he shot her through the head, and then Toole had intercourse with her body.
On 31 October 1979, the naked body of a young girl was found in a culvert on the Interstate 35; her clothes were missing, except for a pair of orange socks by the body. After his arrest, Lucas described how he and Toole had picked up ‘Orange Socks’, who was hitch-hiking, and when she had refused to let Lucas have sex, he strangled her. Lucas eventually received the death sentence for the murder of the unidentified girl.
When Lucas and Toole abducted Becky and Frank Powell in January 1982, they took them with them when they robbed convenience stores; Becky looked so innocent that the proprietor took little notice of the two smelly vagrants who accompanied her—until one of them produced a gun and demanded the money from the till. And, according to Lucas, Becky and Frank often became witnesses to murder—in fact, in one confession he even claimed they had taken part in the killings.
Eventually, Frank and Ottis Toole returned home to Florida, while Becky and Lucas continued ‘on the road’. In January 1982, a couple named Smart, who ran an antiques store in Hemet, California, picked them up, and for five months Lucas worked for them. Then the Smarts asked Lucas if he would like to go back to Texas to look after Mrs Smart’s mother, Kate Rich. He accepted. But after only a few weeks, the Smarts received a telephone call from another sister in Texas, telling them that the new handyman was spending Mrs Rich’s money on large quantities of beer and cigarettes in the local grocery store. Another daughter who went to investigate found Mrs Rich’s house filthy, and Lucas and Becky Powell drunk in bed. Lucas was politely fired. But his luck held. Only a few miles away, he was offered a lift by the Rev. Reuben Moore, who had started his own religious community in nearby Stoneburg. Moore also took pity on the young couple, and they moved in to the House of Prayer. There everyone liked Becky, and she seemed happy. She badly needed a home and security. Both she and Henry became ‘converts’.
But Becky began to feel homesick, and begged Henry to take her back to Florida. A few days later, pieces of her dismembered body were scattered around a field near Denton. And Lucas’s nightmare odyssey of murder was beginning to draw to a close…
The American public, which at first followed Lucas’s confessions with horrified attention, soon began to lose interest. After all, he was already sentenced. So was Ottis Toole (who would also be later condemned to death for the arson murder of George Sonnenberg). And as newspapers ran stories declaring that Lucas had withdrawn his confessions yet again, or that some police officer had proved he was lying, there was a growing feeling that Lucas was not, after all, the worst mass murderer in American history.
It was a couple named Bob and Joyce Lemons who first placed this conviction on a solid foundation. Their daughter, Barbara Sue Williamson, had been murdered in Lubbock, Texas, in August 1975 by an intruder in her home. Lucas confessed to this murder when asked about it by Lubbock lawmen. When the Lemons heard the confession they felt it was a hoax. Lucas said he recalled the house as being white, that he had entered by the screen door, and killed the newly married woman in her bedroom. It was a green house, the screen door had been sealed shut at the time, and Barbara had been killed outside.
The Lemons went and talked to Lucas’s relatives, and soon came up with a list of the periods when he had stayed in Florida which contradicted dozens of his ‘confessions’. But when they confronted Texas Ranger Bob Prince with these discoveries, he became hostile and ordered them out of his office.
Another investigator was also having doubts. Vic Feazell, District Attorney of Waco, Texas, was supposed to be prosecuting Lucas for three murders to which he had confessed, and for which there was not a shred of evidence apart from Lucas’s own words—no fingerprints, no forensic evidence, no witnesses. Feazell joined forces with the Lemons, and was soon convinced that many of Lucas’s confessions were lies. He learned that during one period in 1979, when Lucas had cashed forty-three pay cheques at the local store in Florida—and was therefore presumably resident there—he was on record as confessing to forty-six murders in sixteen states. It was just possible if he rushed around the country by aeroplane, otherwise highly unlikely. (Feazell began to refer to him jokingly as ‘Rocket Man’.)
Confronted by Feazell, and shown the evidence that disproved his confessions, Lucas smiled and said: ‘I was wonderin’ when somebody was goin’ to get wise to this.’
When Feazell announced these conclusions to the press, the roof fell in. Within three days he was under investigation by the FBI for corruption, and his house was searched. He was accused of murder, burglary, bribery and racketeering—charges that could have led to a sentence of eighty years in jail. In fact, Feazell defended himself, and was found not guilty on all counts. He sued the Dallas TV station that had repeated the allegations, and was awarded record damages of $58,000,000.
Feazell is convinced that the Texas Ranger Task Force was behind the persecution. Whether true or not, his acquittal and the enormous damages had the effect of discrediting the Task Force—and, of course, Lucas’s confessions. Lucas had been convicted of ten murders. Feazell is on record as saying that he may be innocent of all of them.
But if Lucas’s own accounts of the murders convinced local police officers that he was guilty—because of the intimate knowledge he showed—then how could he be innocent? According to Feazell (who has become Lucas’s attorney), because the Task Force demanded details of the crimes before local police forces were allowed to interview him about them, and they allowed Lucas to read the reports. Yet this raises the question of why, in that case, he got the Barbara Sue Williamson murder so wrong.
Equally intriguing is the question of why, if Lucas’s confessions to serial murder were all lies, his partner Ottis Toole did not vigorously protest his own innocence to avoid a death sentence. Loyalty to a friend hardly demands accepting a multiple ‘murder rap’.
In the resulting confusion, it looks as if Lucas may escape the death sentence—which is clearly what he wants. Yet this in turn raises the further question of whether his new claims of innocence may not be as unreliable as his earlier claims of guilt.
Looking back over the case, from the moment Lucas decided to confess because he saw a ‘light’ in his cell, it seems virtually impossible to believe that he is totally innocent. At the very least he killed Becky, Kate Rich and ‘Orange Socks’.
At the time of writing (1993), it begins to look as if the likeliest scenario was as follows. Lucas’s original confessions, whether prompted by hallucinations or by genuine religious conversion, were true: he killed Kate Rich and Becky Powell. It is hard to believe that he made these confessions with his tongue in his cheek. It seems likely that many of his subsequent confessions were also true, including murders committed in partnership with Toole. But as the confessions brought notoriety and comfort—he became aware of the benefits of being a ‘star’, and began to wonder how he could maintain this status without the inevitable penalty of the electric chair. The answer was to continue confessing to more murders, and to hope that, sooner or later, these confessions would be recognized as lies, and that this would throw doubt on the murders for which he had been convicted. So when Vic Feazell turned up in his cell with proof that at least forty-six murders were inventions, he must have heaved a sigh of relief. ‘I was wonderin’ when somebody was goin’ to get wise to this.’
And what of Boutwell and Prince? Were they dupes, con-men, or simply good policemen who were doing their best? One thing seems obvious: that their present feelings towards Lucas must be highly uncharitable. He brought them celebrity, then derision. Whatever now happens—even if Lucas is executed—their reputations are irreparably damaged. Yet Boutwell knows that Lucas killed Kate Rich, Becky Powell, and probably a number of others. He also knows that, because of Lucas’s policy of lying, withdrawing the lie and then repeating it, no one will ever be certain whether Lucas and Toole are America’s worst serial killers, or two undistinguished hold-up men. It now seems clear that, whether his claim to be America’s most prolific serial killer is true or not, the mild little man with the glass eye has achieved what he always wanted: a place in American history.
Lucas made the world aware of the ‘wandering killer’, yet in fact, this type of serial murder has remained relatively rare—no doubt because serial killers, like other human beings, prefer the security of a home. So most serial murders have been associated with a specific place—Whitechapel, Hanover, Düsseldorf, Boston. The ‘wandering killers’—from Vacher and Earle Nelson to Knowles and Lucas—can be counted on the fingers of both hands. And the cases of serial murder that always create the greatest stir are those in which the murders occur in the same place, and remain unsolved over a period—the classic Jack the Ripper pattern. In this sense, the first ‘classic’ case of the 1980s was the Atlanta child murders.
By the beginning of July 1980, seven black children in Atlanta had been murdered, and three had vanished without leaving a trace. The series had started a year earlier, when two black teenagers had been found dead near Niskey Lake. In October 1979, two 9-year-old boys vanished; one was found in the crawl-space of an abandoned elementary school. In March 1980, a 12-year-old girl was found tied to a tree and suffocated with her own briefs; she had been raped. But since by now it was assumed that the killer was homosexual (even though there had been no sexual assault), this was not generally counted as one of the ‘series’.
The suspicion that white racists were responsible caused civil unrest in Atlanta, but the police were inclined to believe that the killer was a black, since the children had been picked up mostly in black neighbourhoods, where a white would stand out.
By mid-May 1981, the number of victims had risen to twenty-seven, and black groups had formed to demand action and to raise a reward.
The break in the case came on 22 May, when police close to a bridge on the Chattahoochee River heard a splash, and saw a man climb into a station wagon. It proved to be a plump young black named Wayne Williams, 23, who said he was a music promoter. He was allowed to go after being questioned, but when, two days later, the body of 27-year-old Nathaniel Cater was found in the river, attention switched back to Williams. Dog hairs found on the victim’s body matched those found in William’s station wagon, and a witness testified to seeing Williams leaving a theatre hand in hand with Cater just before his disappearance. Another witness testified to seeing Williams with Jimmy Payne, also found in the river. Forensic examination established that carpet fibres and dog hairs found on ten more victims matched those in the home where Williams lived with his schoolteacher parents. A brilliant young man who studied astronomy and ran his own local radio station, Williams was known to be obsessed by police work. Obsessed also by a desire for quick success, he was also known as a pathological liar.
Although the evidence was circumstantial, Williams was found guilty of the murders of Cater and Payne. Many felt misgivings about the guilty verdict (the black writer James Baldwin regarded the case against Williams as a conspiracy, and saw the rejection of his own book about the case as further evidence of the conspiracy), but the murders stopped after Williams’s arrest.
At the time the Henry Lee Lucas case was causing shock waves in America, a British serial killer was causing much the same sensation across the Atlantic. The British have always felt a certain complacency about their murder record, which has remained relatively constant and relatively low for decades. (Per unit of population, the British rate is less than a sixth that of America.) Besides, England is too small for wandering serial killers. But the case of Dennis Nilsen demonstrated that, even in non-violent Britain, it is still appallingly easy to get away with mass murder in a large city.
On the evening of 8 February 1983, a drains maintenance engineer named Michael Cattran was asked to call at 23 Cranley Gardens, in Muswell Hill, north London, to find out why tenants had been unable to flush their toilets since the previous Saturday. Although Muswell Hill is known as a highly respectable area of London—it was once too expensive for anyone but the upper middle classes—No. 23 proved to be a rather shabby house, divided into flats. A tenant showed Cattran the manhole cover that led to the drainage system. When he removed it, he staggered back and came close to vomiting; the smell was unmistakably decaying flesh. And when he had climbed down the rungs into the cistern, Cattran discovered what was blocking the drain: masses of rotting meat, much of it white, like chicken flesh. Convinced this was human flesh, Cattran rang his supervisor, who decided to come and inspect it in the morning. When they arrived the following day, the drain had been cleared. And a female tenant told them she had heard footsteps going up and down the stairs for much of the night. The footsteps seemed to go up to the top flat, which was rented by a 37-year-old civil servant named Dennis Nilsen.
Closer search revealed that the drain was still not quite clear; there was a piece of flesh, six inches square, and some bones that resembled fingers. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay, of Hornsey CID, was waiting in the hallway of the house that evening when Dennis Nilsen walked in from his day at the office—a Jobcentre in Kentish Town. He told Nilsen he wanted to talk to him about the drains. Nilsen invited the policeman into his flat, and Jay’s face wrinkled as he smelt the odour of decaying flesh. He told Nilsen that they had found human remains in the drain, and asked what had happened to the rest of the body.
‘It’s in there, in two plastic bags,’ said Nilsen, pointing to a wardrobe.
In the police car, the Chief Inspector asked Nilsen whether the remains came from one body or two. Calmly, without emotion, Nilsen said: ‘There have been fifteen or sixteen altogether.’
At the police station, Nilsen—a tall man with metal-rimmed glasses—seemed eager to talk. (In fact, he proved to be something of a compulsive talker, and his talk overflowed into a series of school exercise books in which he later wrote his story for the use of Brian Masters, a young writer who contacted him in prison.) He told police that he had murdered three men in the Cranley Gardens house—into which he moved in the autumn of 1981—and twelve or thirteen at his previous address, 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood.
The plastic bags from the Muswell Hill flat contained two severed heads, and a skull from which the flesh had been stripped–forensic examination revealed that it had been boiled. The bathroom contained the whole lower half of a torso, from the waist down, intact. The rest was in bags in the wardrobe and in the tea chest. At Melrose Avenue, thirteen days and nights of digging revealed many human bones, as well as a cheque book and pieces of clothing.
The self-confessed mass murderer—he seemed to take a certain pride in being ‘Britain’s biggest mass murderer’—was a Scot, born at Fraserburgh on 23 November 1945. His mother, born Betty Whyte, married a Norwegian soldier named Olav Nilsen in 1942. It was not a happy marriage; Olav was seldom at home, and was drunk a great deal; they were divorced seven years after their marriage. In 1954, Mrs Nilsen married again and became Betty Scott. Dennis grew up in the house of his grandmother and grandfather, and was immensely attached to his grandfather, Andrew Whyte, who became a father substitute. When Nilsen was seven, his grandfather died and his mother took Dennis in to see the corpse. This seems to have been a traumatic experience; in his prison notes he declares ‘My troubles started there.’ The death of his grandfather was such a blow that it caused his own emotional death, according to Nilsen. Not long after this, someone killed the two pigeons he kept in an air raid shelter, another severe shock. His mother’s remarriage when he was nine had the effect of making him even more of a loner.
In 1961, Nilsen enlisted in the army, and became a cook. It was during this period that he began to get drunk regularly, although he remained a loner, avoiding close relationships. In 1972 he changed the life of a soldier for that of a London policeman, but disliked the relative lack of freedom—compared to the army—and resigned after only eleven months. He became a security guard for a brief period, then a job-interviewer for the Manpower Services Commission.
In November 1975, Nilsen began to share a north London flat—in Melrose Avenue—with a young man named David Gallichan, ten years his junior. Gallichan was later to insist that there was no homosexual relationship, and this is believable. Many heterosexual young men would later accept Nilsen’s offer of a bed for the night, and he would make no advances, or accept a simple ‘No’ without resentment. But in May 1977, Gallichan decided he could bear London no longer, and accepted a job in the country. Nilsen was furious; he felt rejected and deserted. The break-up of the relationship with Gallichan—whom he had always dominated—seems to have triggered the homicidal violence that would claim fifteen lives.
The killings began more than a year later, in December 1978. Around Christmas, Nilsen picked up a young Irish labourer in the Cricklewood Arms, and they went back to his flat to continue drinking. Nilsen wanted him to stay over the New Year but the Irishman had other plans. In a note he later wrote for his biographer Brian Masters, Nilsen gives as his motive for this first killing that he was lonely and wanted to spare himself the pain of separation. In another confession he also implies that he has no memory of the actual killing. Nilsen strangled the unnamed Irishman in his sleep with a tie. Then he undressed the body and carefully washed it, a ritual he observed in all his killings. After that he placed the body under the floorboards where—as incredible as it seems—he kept it until the following August. He eventually burned it on a bonfire at the bottom of the garden, burning some rubber at the same time to cover the smell.
In November 1979, Nilsen attempted to strangle a young Chinaman who had accepted his offer to return to the flat; the Chinaman escaped and reported the attack to the police. But the police believed Nilsen’s explanation that the Chinaman was trying to ‘rip him off’ and decided not to pursue the matter.
The next murder victim was a 23-year-old Canadian called Kenneth James Ockendon, who had completed a technical training course and was taking a holiday before starting his career. He had been staying with an uncle and aunt in Carshalton after touring the Lake District. He was not a homosexual, and it was pure bad luck that he got into conversation with Nilsen in the Princess Louise in High Holborn around 3 December 1979. They went back to Nilsen’s flat, ate ham, eggs and chips, and bought £20 worth of alcohol. Ockendon watched television, then listened to rock music on Nilsen’s hi-fi system. Then he sat listening to music wearing earphones, watching television at the same time. This may have been what cost him his life; Nilsen liked to talk, and probably felt ‘rejected’. ‘I thought bloody good guest this…’ And sometime after midnight, while Ockendon was still wearing the headphones, he strangled him with a flex. Ockendon was so drunk that he put up no struggle. And Nilsen was also so drunk that after the murder, he sat down, put on the headphones, and went on playing music for hours. When he tried to put the body under the floorboards the next day, rigor mortis had set in and it was impossible. He had to wait until the rigor had passed. Later, he dissected the body. Ockendon had large quantities of Canadian money in his moneybelt, but Nilsen tore this up. The rigorous Scottish upbringing would not have allowed him to steal.
Nilsen’s accounts of the murders are repetitive, and make them sound mechanical and almost identical. The third victim in May 1980, was a 16-year-old butcher named Martyn Duffey, who was also strangled and placed under the floorboards. Number four was a 16-year-old Scot named Billy Sutherland—again strangled in his sleep with a tie and placed under the floorboards. Number five was an unnamed Mexican or Filipino, killed a few months later. Number six was an Irish building worker. Number seven was an undernourished down-and-out picked up in a doorway. (He was burned on the bonfire all in one piece.) The next five victims, all unnamed, were killed equally casually between late 1980 and late 1981. Nilsen later insisted that all the murders had been without sexual motivation—a plea that led Brian Masters to entitle his book on the case Killing for Company. There are moments in Nilsen’s confessions when it sounds as if, like so many serial killers, he felt as if he was being taken over by a Mr Hyde personality or possessed by some demonic force.
In October 1981, Nilsen moved into an upstairs flat in Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill. On 25 November, he took a homosexual student named Paul Nobbs back with him, and they got drunk. The next day, Nobbs went into University College Hospital for a check-up, and was told that bruises on his throat indicated that someone had tried to strangle him. Nilsen apparently changed his mind at the last moment.
The next victim, John Howlett, was less lucky. He woke up as Nilsen tried to strangle him and fought back hard; Nilsen had to bang his head against the headrest of the bed to subdue him. When he realized Howlett was still breathing, Nilsen drowned him in the bath. He hacked up the body in the bath, then boiled chunks in a large pot to make them easier to dispose of. (He also left parts of the body out in plastic bags for the dustbin men to take away.)
In May 1982, another intended victim escaped—a drag-artiste called Carl Stottor. After trying to strangle him, Nilsen placed him in a bath of water, but changed his mind and allowed him to live. When he left the flat, Stottor even agreed to meet Nilsen again—but decided not to keep the appointment. He decided not to go to the police.
The last two victims were both unnamed, one a drunk and one a drug-addict. In both cases, Nilsen claims to be unable to remember the actual killing. Both were dissected, boiled and flushed down the toilet. It was after this second murder—the fifteenth in all—that the tenants complained about blocked drains, and Nilsen was arrested.
The trial began on 24 October 1983, in the same court where Peter Sutcliffe had been tried two years earlier. Nilsen was charged with six murders and two attempted murders, although he had confessed to fifteen murders and seven attempted murders. He gave the impression that he was enjoying his moment of glory. The defence pleaded diminished responsibility, and argued that the charge should be reduced to manslaughter. The jury declined to accept this, and on 4 November 1983, Nilsen was found guilty by a vote of 10 to 2, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Perhaps the most horrific serial murder case of the 1980s was one that came to light in California in June, 1985.
On Sunday 2 June, a shop assistant at the South City Lumber Store in San Francisco noticed when a young man walked out without paying for a $75 vice. The assistant hurried outside to speak to Police Officer Daniel Wright, and by the time the young man—who looked Asiatic—was putting the vice in the boot of a car, the officer was right behind him. When he realized he was being followed, the young man fled. Wright gave chase, but the skinny youth was too fast for him, and vanished across a main road.
When Wright returned to the car—a Honda Prelude—a bearded, bald-headed man was standing by it. ‘It was a mistake,’ he explained, ‘He thought I’d paid already. But I have paid now.’ He held out a sales receipt.
That should have ended the incident—except for the fact that the young Asian had fled, ruling out the possibility that it was merely an honest mistake. Wright wondered if anything else in the car might be stolen. ‘What’s in there?’, he asked, pointing at a green holdall.
‘I don’t know. It belongs to him.’
Wright unzipped it and found that it contained a .22 pistol, with a silencer on the barrel. Americans have a right to own handguns, but not with silencers—such attachments being unlikely to have an innocent purpose.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come down to headquarters to explain this.’
At the police station, the bearded man handed over a driver’s licence to establish his identity; it indicated that he was Robin Scott Stapley. He explained that he hardly knew the youth who had run away—he had just been about to hire him to do some work.
‘We’ll have to do a computer check on the car. But you’ll probably have to post bond before you can be released.’
‘Stapley’ asked if he could have some paper and a pencil, and a glass of water. When the policeman returned with these items, he scribbled a few words on the sheet of paper, tossed a capsule into his mouth and swallowed it down with water. Moments later, he slumped forward on the tabletop.
Assuming it was a heart attack, the police called an ambulance. The hospital rang them later to say that the man had been brain-dead on arrival, but had been placed on a life support system.
The medic added that he was fairly certain the man had not suffered a heart attack; it was more likely that he had swallowed some form of poison. In fact, the poison was soon identified as cyanide. The note ‘Stapley’ had scribbled had been an apology to his wife for what he was about to do. Four days later, removed from the life support system, the man died without recovering consciousness.
By this time, the police had realized that he was not Robin Stapley. The real Robin Stapley had been reported missing in February. But soon after this there had been a curious incident involving his camper, which had been in collision with a pickup truck. The young Chinaman who had been driving the camper had accepted responsibility and asked the other driver not to report it. But since it was a company vehicle, the driver was obliged to report the accident.
The Honda the two had been driving proved to be registered in the name of Paul Cosner. And Cosner had also been reported missing. He had told his girlfriend that he had sold the car to a ‘weird-looking man’ who would pay cash, and driven off to deliver it; no one had seen him since.
The Honda was handed over to the forensic experts for examination; they discovered two bullet holes in the front seat, two spent slugs, and some human bloodstains.
If the bearded man was not Robin Stapley, who was he? Some papers found in the Honda bore the name Charles Gunnar, with an address near Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, 150 miles north-east of San Francisco. Inspector Tom Eisenmann was assigned to go and check on Gunnar. In Wilseyville he spoke to Sheriff Claude Ballard, and learned that Ballard already had his suspicions about Gunnar, and about the slightly built Chinese youth, Charles Ng (pronounced Ing) with whom he lived. They had been advertising various things for sale, such as television sets, videos and articles of furniture, and Ballard had suspected they might be stolen. However, checks on serial numbers had come to nothing. What was more ominous was that Gunnar had offered for sale furniture belonging to a young couple, Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor, explaining that they had moved to Los Angeles with their baby and had given him the furniture to pay a debt. No one had heard from them since. And at a nearby camp site at Schaad Lake, another couple had simply vanished, leaving behind their tent and a coffee pot on the stove.
By now, a check on the dead man’s fingerprints had revealed that he had a criminal record—for burglary and grand larceny in Mendocino County—and had jumped bail there. His real name was Leonard Lake.
Eisenmann’s investigation into Lake’s background convinced the detective that this man seemed to be associated with many disappearances. His younger brother Donald had been reported missing in July 1983 after setting out to visit Lake in a ‘survivalist commune’ in Humboldt County. Charles Gunnar, whose identity Lake had borrowed, had been best man at Lake’s wedding, but had also vanished in 1985. Together with Stapley and Costner and the Bond couple and their baby, that made seven unexplained disappearances.
The next step, obviously, was to search the small ranch in Blue Mountain Road, where Lake and Ng had lived. Sheriff Ballard obtained the search warrant, and he and Eisenmann drove out with a team of deputies. The ‘ranch’ proved to be a two-bedroom bungalow set in three acres of land. It looked ordinary enough from the outside, but the sight of the master bedroom caused the detectives a sense of foreboding. Hooks in the ceiling and walls suggested that it might be some kind of torture chamber, while a box full of chains and shackles could have only one use: to immobilize someone on the bed. A wardrobe proved to contain many women’s undergarments and some filmy nightgowns.
There was also some expensive video equipment. This led Eisenbrunn’s assistant, Sergeant Irene Brunn, to speculate whether it might be connected with a case she had investigated in San Francisco. A couple called Harvey and Deborah Dubs, had vanished from their apartment, together with their 16-month-old baby son, and neighbours had seen a young Chinese man removing the contents of their apartment—including an expensive video. She had the serial numbers in her notebook. Her check confirmed her suspicion: this was the missing equipment.
Deputies came in to report that they had been scouring the hillside at the back of the house, and had found burnt tones that looked ominously human. Ballard and Eisenmann went out to see. Among the bones were teeth that looked human. Ballard also noted a trench that seemed to have been intended for a telephone cable; he ordered the deputies to dig it up.
Close to the trench there was a cinderblock bunker that had been cut into the hillside and covered over with earth. Ballard had heard that ‘Gunnar’ was a ‘survival freak’, one who expected a nuclear war to break out, and who was determined to outlive it; this looked like his air raid shelter. He ordered the deputies to break in.
The room on the other side of the door was a storeroom containing food, water, candles and guns. A trap door in the floor led into a kind of cellar, from whose ceiling were suspended more hooks and chains. The walls were covered with pictures of girls posing in their lingerie. What was disturbing about this was that the backdrop of many of these showed a forest scene mural that covered one of the walls; they had obviously been taken in the same room. And the expression on some of the faces suggested that the girls were not enjoying it.
A filing cabinet in the basement proved to be full of videotapes. Eisenmann read the inscription on one of these—‘M. Ladies, Kathy/Brenda’—and slipped it into the recorder. A moment later, they were looking at a recording of a frightened girl handcuffed to a chair, with a young Chinaman—obviously Charles Ng—holding a knife beside her. A large, balding man with a beard enters the frame and proceeds to remove the girl’s handcuffs, then shackles her ankles, and orders her to undress. Her reluctance is obvious, particularly when she comes to her knickers. The bearded man tells her: ‘You’ll wash for us, clean for us, fuck for us.’ After this, she is made to go into the shower with the Chinaman. A later scene showed her strapped naked to a bed, while the bearded man tells her that her boyfriend Mike is dead.
After ‘Kathy’ the video showed ‘Brenda’—identified by Sheriff Ballard as the missing Brenda O’Connor—handcuffed to a chair, while Ng cut off her clothes. She asks after her baby, and Lake tells her that it has been placed with a family in Fresno. She asks: ‘Why do you guys do this?’, and he tells her: ‘We don’t like you. Do you want me to put it in writing?’ ‘Don’t cut my bra off.’ ‘Nothing is yours now.’ ‘Give my baby back to me. I’ll do anything you want.’ ‘You’re going to do anything we want anyway.’
Other videos showed more women being shackled, raped and tortured with a knife. Sergeant Brunn recognized one of these as Deborah Dubs, who had vanished from her San Francisco apartment with her husband and baby. Leonard Lake had spent his last two years making home-made ‘snuff movies’. The prefix ‘M. Ladies’ obviously stood for ‘murdered ladies’.
When the deputies digging in the trench outside reported finding two bodies, the shaken police officers became aware that this was could be one of the worst cases of serial murder in California’s history—or, indeed, in the history of America.
Lake’s accomplice Charles Ng was now one of the most wanted men in America, but had not been seen since his disappearance. Police had discovered that he had fled back to his apartment, travelled out to San Francisco Airport on the Underground, and there bought himself a ticket to Chicago under the name ‘Mike Kimoto’. Four days later, a San Francisco gun dealer notified the police that Ng had telephoned him from Chicago. The man had been repairing Ng’s automatic pistol, and Ng wanted to know if he could send him the gun by post, addressing it to him at the Chateau Hotel under the name Mike Kimoto. When the gun dealer had explained that it would be illegal to send handguns across state lines, Ng had cursed and threatened him with violence if he went to the police.
By the time Chicago police arrived at the Chateau Hotel, the fugitive had already left. From there on, the trail went dead.
Meanwhile, the team led by Eisenmann and Ballard were continuing to explore Leonard Lake’s chamber of horrors. The position of the first two badly decomposed bodies near the top of the trench led to the recognition that there would almost certainly be more lower down. The Coroner Terry Parker was sent for, and Chief Inspector Joseph Lordan in San Francisco notified that additional men would be needed. The next two bodies to be unearthed were black men. Ng, who was known for his hatred of blacks, had once taken two blacks to the ranch as labourers.
Some of the burnt bones dumped on the hillside were in small, neat segments. (Lake had used two fifty-gallon drums as incinerators.) This was explained when the police found a bloodstained power saw, which had obviously been used to cut up the bodies. Coroner Parker supervised the collection of the bones, which were taken away in plastic sacks.
Tracker dogs were brought in to sniff for other bodies. They soon located a grave that proved to contain the remains of a man, woman and baby. These could be either the Dubs family or the Lonnie Bond family—they were too decomposed for immediate recognition. A bulldozer removed the top layer of earth to make digging easier.
As work proceeded in the hundred-degree heat, crowds of reporters lost no opportunity to ask questions. Magazines like Time and Newsweek had reported the finds, so this latest story of American serial murder soon achieved international notoriety. Earlier cases—like the Dean Corll murders in Texas in the early 1970s, or the John Gacy murders in Chicago in the early 1980s—had caused much the same shock effect. But in this case, even the sensational press seemed oddly subdued in its approach to the story, and gave it less space-inches than might be expected. It was as if the sheer horror of the details was too much even for the most news-hungry editor.
The discovery of the cabinet of snuff videos was followed by one that was in some ways even more disturbing: Lake’s detailed diaries covering the same two-year period. The first one, for 1984, began: ‘Leonard Lake, a name not seen or used much these days in my second year as a fugitive. Mostly dull day-to-day routine—still with death in my pocket and fantasy my goal.’
The diaries made it clear that his career of murder had started before he moved into the ranch on Blue Mountain Road. He had been a member of many communes, and in one at a place called Mother Lode, in Humboldt County, he had murdered his younger brother Donald. A crude map of northern California, with crosses labelled ‘buried treasure’, suggested the possibility that these were the sites of more murders; but the map was too inaccurate to guide searchers to the actual locations.
Who was Leonard Lake? Investigation of his background revealed that he had been born in 1946 in San Francisco, and that he had a highly disturbed childhood. Rejected by both parents at an early age, he was raised by his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian. Both his father and mother came from a family of alcoholics. The grandfather, also an alcoholic, was a violent individual who subjected the child to a kind of military discipline. Lake’s younger brother Donald, his mother’s favourite, was an epileptic who had experienced a serious head injury; he practised sadistic cruelty to animals and tried to rape both his sisters. Lake protected the sisters ‘in return for sexual favours’. From an early age he had displayed the sexual obsession that seems to characterize the serial killer. He took nude photographs of his sisters and cousins, and later became a maker of pornographic movies starring his wife.
Lake shared another characteristic of so many serial killers—he lived in a world of fantasy—boasting, for example, of daring exploits in Vietnam when, in fact, he had never seen combat. On the other hand, it seems clear that his experiences in Vietnam caused some fundamental change that made him antisocial and capable of violence. Yet he was skilful in hiding his abnormality, teaching grade school, working as a volunteer firefighter, and donating time to a company that provided free insulation in old people’s homes. He seemed an exemplary citizen. But his outlook was deeply pessimistic, convinced that World War Three would break out at any moment. Like other ‘survivalists’, he often dressed in combat fatigues, and talked of living off the land. Once out of the marines, his behaviour became increasingly odd. After being forced to flee from the earlier compound because of the burglary charge, he had moved to the ranch near Wilseyville. Marriage to a girl called Cricket Balazs had broken up, but she had continued to act as a fence for stolen credit cards and other items. Lake seems to have loved her—at least he said so in a last note scrawled as he was dying—but he nevertheless held on to the paranoid idea that women were responsible for all his problems.
It was while living in an isolated village called Miranda in the hills of Northern California that Lake thought out the plan he called Operation Miranda: the plan he went on to put into effect in the ranch on Blue Mountain Road. It was to stockpile food, clothing and weapons against the coming nuclear holocaust, and also to kidnap women who would be kept imprisoned and used as sex slaves. ‘The perfect woman’, he explained in his diary, ‘is totally controlled.’ (He meant that he, Lake, would have total control over her.) ‘A woman who does exactly what she is told to and nothing else. There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman. There are no frustrations—only pleasure and contentment.’
The journal left no doubt about Lake’s method for collecting his sex slaves. Leonard Lake had made a habit of luring people to the house, often inviting them—like the Bond family—to dinner. Then the man and the baby were murdered, probably almost immediately. The woman was stripped of her clothes, shackled, and sexually abused until her tormentors grew bored with her. Then she was killed and buried or burned. The thought of the mental torment inflicted on girls like Brenda O’Connor, Deborah Dubs and Kathy Allen sickened everyone on the case.
But one other thing also emerged clearly from these journals, and was noted by the psychiatrist Joel Norris, who published a study of Lake in his book The Menace of the Serial Killer: that when Lake killed himself, he was in a state of depression and moral bankruptcy.
His dreams of success had eluded him, he admitted to himself that his boasts about heroic deeds in Vietnam were all delusions, and the increasing number of victims he was burying in the trench behind his bunker only added to his unhappiness. By the time he was arrested in San Francisco, Lake had reached the final stage of the serial murderer syndrome: he realized that he had come to a dead end with nothing but his own misery to show for it.
Two weeks after the digging began, the police had unearthed nine bodies and forty pounds of human bones, some burnt, some even boiled. The driving licences of Robin Stapley and of Ng’s friend Mike Carroll (the boyfriend of Kathy Allen), and papers relating to Paul Cosner’s car, confirmed that they had been among the victims.
When the ‘survival bunker’ itself was finally dismantled and taken away on trucks, it seemed clear that the site had yielded most of its evidence. This suggested that Lake had murdered and buried twenty-five people there. The identity of many of the victims remained unknown. The only person who might be able to shed some light on it was the missing Charles Ng. It was believed that he had crossed the border into Canada—a man answering to Ng’s description had been seen in the men’s room at a bus station shaving off his sideboards and trimming his eyebrows.
Then, on Saturday 6 July 1985, nearly five weeks after Ng’s flight, a security guard in a department store in Calgary, Alberta, saw a young Chinaman pushing food under his jacket; when he challenged him, the youth drew a pistol; as they grappled, he fired, wounding the guard in the hand. He ran away at top speed, but was intercepted by other guards. The youth obviously had some training in Japanese martial arts, but was eventually overpowered and handcuffed. Identification documents revealed that he was Charles Ng.
FBI agents hurried to Calgary, and were allowed a long interview. Ng admitted that he knew about the murders, but put the blame entirely on Lake. And before the agents could see him again, Ng’s lawyers—appointed by the court—advised him against another interview. And after a psychiatric examination, Ng was tried on a charge of armed robbery and sentenced to four and a half years. But efforts by the California Attorney-General John Van de Kamp to make sure he was extradited after his sentence met with frustration. California, unlike Canada, still had the death penalty, and the extradition treaty stipulates that a man cannot be extradited if he might face the death penalty.
In November 1989, after serving three and a half years of his sentence, Ng was ordered back to California to face the murder charges against him. Amnesty International protested against the extradition on the grounds that it might result in Ng’s execution. A government lawyer replied that if Canada became known as a ‘safe haven’ for killers, other US murderers could flee there. Amnesty International’s action caused widespread indignation, and calls for Ng to be sent back immediately. In due course, Ng was returned to California.
At the time of writing, Ng has still not been brought to trial. If and when that happens, the full extent of the horrors that occurred at the Blue Mountain Road ranch may finally emerge in court. But it is hard to see how public disclosure of Lake’s depravity can serve any useful purpose.
The case of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng is an example of what we have described as folie à deux—cases in which crimes would almost certainly not have taken place unless two participants had egged each other on. An earlier case, while it created a sense of shocked incredulity in California, has received far less publicity. Yet it may be seen as the American equivalent of the Moors murder case.
Soon after midnight on Sunday 2 November 1980, a young couple emerged from the Carousel restaurant in Sacramento, California, where they had been attending a dance. As they crossed the car park they were accosted by a pretty blonde whose swollen stomach indicated pregnancy. They stopped politely—then realized she was holding a gun. ‘Get in,’ she said, pointing to an Oldsmobile van parked a few feet away. The sullen-looking man in the passenger seat was also holding a gun. They decided it would be best to obey and climbed into the back.
Before the blonde could enter the driver’s door, a passing student with a freakish sense of humour was ahead of her, slipping into the driver’s seat. Andy Beal had invited the young couple back to his room for a late night drink. But a single glance at the face of his friends told him there was something wrong. This was confirmed when the pretty blonde flew at him with a stream of obscenities: ‘Get out of my fucking car!’, and slapped his face. As he watched the car drive away, with a screech of tyres, Andy Beal had the presence of mind to memorize its numberplate, then write it down. Minutes later, he was telephoning the police to report the abduction of Craig Miller and his fiancée Beth Sowers.
The Oldsmobile proved to be registered to a girl called Charlene Williams, daughter of a wealthy Sacramento businessman. The police found her at her parents’ home the following morning. Charlene insisted that she had spent the previous evening alone, and had no idea who had used her car. Soon after the police had left, they heard that Craig Miller’s body had been found; he had been shot three times in the back of the head. When they returned to ask Charlene further questions, she had left. So had her ‘husband’, an ex-convict called Gerald Gallego.
Five days later, the body of Beth Sowers was also found—dumped, like Craig Miller, in a field. She had been raped and shot. It looked as if the motive for the abduction and murder of the young couple had been simply the rape of Beth Sowers.
The manhunt for Gerald Gallego and Charlene Williams ended two weeks later, as Charlene emerged from a Western Union office in Omaha, Nebraska, with $500 her parents had wired her. The Williams had also tipped off the police. By now, the Sacramento police had been doing a great deal of research into the background of Gerald Armand Gallego. It seemed to indicate that he and Charlene made a habit of abduction and murder, and that the motive was Gallego’s uncontrollable sexual appetite. On 17 July 1980 a pretty waitress named Virginia Mochel had vanished after leaving the tavern where she worked; her naked body had been found not long before the latest murders. And two years earlier, two teenage girls, Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught, had vanished from a Sacramento shopping mall. Forty-eight hours later, their bodies were found in a meadow; both had been raped, then knocked out with a tyre iron and shot. In July 1980, the decomposing bodies of two more teenage girls, Stacy Ann Redican and Karen Chipman-Twiggs, were found in Nevada; they had also vanished from a Sacramento shopping centre four months earlier.
When it became clear to Charlene Williams that she and her ‘husband’ faced the death penalty for the murders of Craig Miller and Beth Sowers, she decided to enter into plea bargaining, and agreed to tell the whole story. They had, she admitted, been responsible for the deaths of the four teenagers abducted from Sacramento shopping malls, and for that of the waitress Virginia Mochel. These, together with Craig Miller and Beth Sowers, made seven. And there were another three, of which the Sacramento police knew nothing. The motive, she explained, was Gerald Gallego’s peculiar obsession. He wanted to find ‘the perfect sex slave’, a girl who would do anything he asked. And she, Charlene, was so besotted with him that she had agreed meekly to help him kidnap the ‘slaves’.
Gallego, the police discovered, was already wanted on a different charge in Butte County. In 1978, two weeks after he had killed Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught, his 14-year-old daughter, Sally Jo, had gone to the police and told them that her father had been committing incest with her since she was 8. And to celebrate his thirty-second birthday, he had spent the afternoon with his daughter and her teenage girlfriend in Charlene’s Oldsmobile, committing rape and sodomy. And Sally Jo, already full of resentment at her father’s new ladylove, had decided this was the last straw. Gallego fled to avoid arrest.
Charlene described how she had met Gallego on a blind date in 1977. At 21 she had already been married and divorced twice; most of the men she had been sleeping with since her early teens had been inadequate. This strutting little ex-con—he was only five feet seven tall—had a gruff dominance that enchanted her. According to Charlene, his sexual appetite was immense, and she was expected to help him satisfy it without receiving any pleasure in return. Being something of a masochist, she explained, she accepted this as part of her duty. When he excited himself sexually by confiding in her his violent fantasies of rape and violence, she also accepted this as one of the peculiarities of her macho lover. And when Gallego told her that he dreamed of the ‘perfect sex slave’, and asked her to help him find one, she felt she had no alternative; he was her master…
Gallego was undoubtedly a highly disturbed man, and his life cannot be understood without knowing that his father was also a killer. Gerald Albert Gallego had first been arrested for stealing his stepfather’s car; it took seven policemen to get the cuffs on him and he swore revenge. Released from youth custody at the age of 18 in 1946, Gallego senior met an 18-year-old girl who had already been married twice, and married her five hours later; when she gave birth to Gerald Gallego, her husband was doing a stint in San Quentin. He committed his first murder soon after, killing a man in a rage by beating him to death with his fists. But it was in May 1954, when in a town jail on suspicion of murder that Gallego Snr attacked the guard, grabbed his gun, then made him drive out of town before killing him. ‘It made me feel real good inside.’ Recaptured, he escaped again four months later, with another convicted killer; they overpowered a guard by throwing acid in his eyes, then kicked him to death. Hunted down with bloodhounds, he was executed in the death chamber at San Quentin in March 1955, at the age of 28. His 9-year-old son knew nothing of this—until he was 17 he believed that his father had died in an accident.
But by that time it was obvious that Gerald Armand Gallego was following in his father’s footsteps. He had started getting into trouble at the age of 10; at 13 he was found guilty of having sex with a 7-year-old girl, and sentenced to juvenile detention—in the same reformatory where his father had served time.
From now on, his life was dominated by a craving for sex and by hatred of authority. He once told a prison visitor: ‘The only thing I want is to kill God.’ By the time he was 32 he had been married six times—the sixth wife being Charlene Williams, whom he like to call Ding-a-Ling.
Charlene’s father Chuck Williams had started in business as a supermarket butcher, moved to Sacramento as a supermarket manager, and eventually became vice-president of a nationwide supermarket chain. When his wife Mercedes had an accident to her back that made her less mobile, the teenage Charlene took over the job of hostess to her father’s business associates.
In her mid-teens, Charlene became a rebel and tried drugs, alcohol and sex. She came close to being expelled from school; but her father was usually able to smooth over her problems. But two marriages quickly collapsed—perhaps because her husbands were unable to live up to her father-image of the dominant male.
In September 1977 she went—unwillingly—on a blind date with a friend; her partner was Gerald Gallego. He had the kind of dominance she admired. But long before they had collaborated on ten murders, Charlene insisted, she had realized her mistake, and longed to escape from the brutal, insensitive little egoist…
This, at all events, was Charlene’s story. It was flatly contradicted by Gallego, and Eric van Hoffmann, the author of a book on the case called Venom in the Blood, agrees with Gallego. According to Hoffmann, Charlene Williams was a bisexual nymphomaniac. Her sex life with Gallego was satisfactory enough until, in 1978, Gallego brought home a 16-year-old go-go dancer, who shared their bed for a night and was sodomized by Gallego. The next day Gallego returned unexpectedly from work to find Charlene and the girl engaged in sex with a dildo. He threw the girl out and beat Charlene; from then on, he lost his appetite for Charlene. But when, on his daughter’s fourteenth birthday, Gallego had sex with both her and her girlfriend, it was clear to Charlene (who was present) that he was not impotent. At this point, according to Hoffmann, Charlene suggested the idea of kidnapping and murder. In each case, the victims were forced to have sex with Charlene as well as Gallego. Charlene liked to bite one of the girls—in one case virtually biting off a nipple—as the other brought her to a climax with oral sex. Hoffmann’s account suggests that Charlene was the driving force behind the murders. As absurd as it sounds, Gallego emerges at the end of the book as her victim.
This certainly makes more sense than the other book on the case, All His Father’s Sins by Biondi and Hecox, in which Charlene is presented as the pliable victim. And once again we become aware that one of the basic keys to the mind of the serial killer is a kind of ‘spoiltness’ that leads to a total inability to identify with other human beings. In this case, it seems clear that it was the spoilt rich girl who was trapped in total self-centredness, while the working-class Gallego, for all his faults, was more normal and realistic.
According to Charlene’s confession, it was because she was completely enslaved to Gallego that she had approached the two pretty teenagers, Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught, in the shopping mall and asked them if they would like to smoke some pot. Unsuspectingly, the girls had accompanied her back to the Oldsmobile van. Then Gallego had confronted them with a gun, and Charlene had to drive to a remote spot, where the girls were ordered out. They were taken into some pine trees; Gallego was carrying a sleeping bag. Hours later, Gallego returned with the girls, who looked dishevelled and tear-stained. Charlene was told to drive to another remote place; then he took the girls, one by one, and shot them. As they were about to drive away, he noticed that one of them—Kippi Vaught—was still moving; he got out of the van and shot her in the back of the head. The coroner later discovered that the first shot had only grazed her skull. If she had not moved, she would have been alive when the police reached her, and been able to describe her assailant…
It was two weeks later that Gallego’s daughter told the police about the long-term incest, and Gallego was on the run.
The next two victims, again teenage girls, were picked up at the annual county fair in Reno on 24 June 1978. Charlene approached Kaye Colley and Brenda Judd, and asked if they would like a job distributing leaflets. In the back of the van, they were confronted by Gallego with a pistol. This time there was a mattress and blankets on the floor. Charlene drove; Gallego ordered the girls to strip—one of them had vomited. Then Gallego raped them both. A long time later, Charlene was ordered to drive on. The girls were taken out one by one and killed with hammer blows to the skull.
Ten months later, on 24 April 1980, Stacy Ann Redican and Karen Chipman-Twiggs were accosted by the pretty blonde girl in the Sunrise Mall in Sacramento; they were totally unsuspicious until confronted by the little man with a gun. This time, in remote Nevada woods, Charlene left the van while Gallego raped the girls and made them perform the various services that might qualify them as ‘perfect sex slaves’. Then, as before, he took them off one by one and killed them with a hammer. Not long after that murder, Gallego and Charlene were married. But since Gallego had omitted to get a divorce from a previous wife, it was not legal anyway.
Scarcely a month later, on 6 June 1980, they passed an attractive hippie walking along the road between Port Orford, Oregon, and Gold Beach; her name was Linda Teresa Aguilar, and she was five months pregnant. The man and woman in the van looked safe enough, so she accepted a lift. As Charlene drove, Gallego climbed over into the back with the hippie and ordered her to undress. Then Charlene stopped the van and went for a walk. When she finally returned, Gallego was complaining that the girl had been unable to ‘do anything for him’. He took her away and knocked her unconscious with a hammer; an autopsy would later reveal that she was still alive when he buried her in the sand.
The next victim had been the waitress, Virginia Mochel, a pretty blonde girl not unlike Charlene. On 17 July 1980, after the tavern had closed, Gallego accosted the waitress as she climbed into her own car. It was a dangerous thing to do—there were still many customers around, and Gallego had been talking to the girl all evening. Virginia, who had left her two children with a babysitter, begged to be allowed to call and explain that she was delayed. Gallego told her to shut up. They drove back to the apartment Charlene shared with him, and Charlene went inside while Gallego raped Virginia in the van, then strangled her. It was dawn when they finally dumped her on a levee road.
As already noted, Gallego’s account, which is accepted by van Hoffmann, has Charlene taking a far more active part in the murders.
Whatever the truth, the rampage was now almost over. After Craig Miller and Beth Sowers had been abducted from outside the Carousel restaurant on 2 November 1980, Charlene drove to a remote field; Miller was made to get out and lie on the ground, then killed with three bullets in the back of the head. Beth Sowers was taken back to the Gallego apartment and raped, while—Charlene declares—she waited in the next room. Then Beth was also taken to a remote place and shot. But this time, Gallego’s carelessness—in abducting his latest victims in a parking lot with other customers around—led to his downfall.
At the arraignment proceedings, Gallego leapt to his feet and screamed at reporters: ‘Get the hell out of here! We’re not funny people! We’re not animals.’ He fought violently, overturning tables and chairs before he was subdued.
Because of the sheer horror caused by the case, the Gallego trial was moved from Sacramento to Martinez, near San Francisco. It became clear that Gallego was an almost insane egoist. But his attempts to exclude Charlene’s testimony—on the grounds that they were married—failed when it was proved that he had still not divorced his second wife. On 21 June 1983, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection in San Quentin. Since that time, he has proved to be a consistently difficult prisoner, whose violence and abusiveness have meant that he has spent most of his time separated from other prisoners. Charlene Williams received sixteen years.
Does not Charlene’s involvement contradict the view, suggested elsewhere in this book, that all serial killers are working-class? In fact, as far as I can see, there is no psychological law that dictates that a middle- or upper-class person would be incapable of being a serial killer. The fact that all serial killers have had working-class backgrounds only proves that childhood misery and poverty can produce the kind of resentment that leads to serial murder. But the fifteenth-century child murderer Gilles de Rais was spoilt and wealthy, and there seems to be no reason why a modern Gilles should be an impossibility.
Fortunately, at the time of writing, no such person has emerged. When I came across the case of the New Jersey ‘torso killer’ Richard Cottingham, I was at first inclined to believe that he was an exception. Cottingham, a computer operator who worked for an insurance company, was arrested in May 1980 after screams from a motel room alerted the manager that something was wrong. Cottingham had been torturing a prostitute for several hours, and fairly certainly intended to kill her, as he had killed half a dozen other women. Cottingham’s method was to pick up a woman, take her to a bar and slip a drug into her drink, then take her to a motel and rape and torture her. Some victims were allowed to go; others were strangled and mutilated.
Cottingham was the son of an insurance salesman who was brought up in a suburban home, and had attended high school before he married and became a computer programmer. But Ron Leith’s book The Prostitute Murders reveals that he was born in the Bronx—which might be regarded as New York’s equivalent of London’s East End—and spoke with a Bronx accent. He spent the first ten years of his life in the Bronx, before the family moved to New Jersey. His father was absent from home most of the time, and Cottingham—an only child—found it difficult to make friends at school. Nothing is known of the psychological causes of his passion to humiliate and torture women. But it seems clear that Cottingham is another example of the working-class serial killer.
Cottingham’s most obvious characteristic was a high degree of conceit. Like so many serial killers, he seems to have had no doubt that he was the cleverest person in the courtroom. Ron Leith, who was in court, comments that it was Cottingham himself who cemented the state’s case, giving an implausibly intricate alibi, and lecturing the judge on the strange world of prostitution. ‘His arrogance seemed limitless.’
This, then, seems to be the common denominator of serial killers—egoism combined with a kind of tunnel vision. But then, we have all known people like that—people who obviously believe that they are the most fascinating person in the world, and who regard it as natural to begin every sentence with ‘I’. There must always have been such people. Then why is it that, in our own time, a percentage of them have turned into serial killers?
We have noted already the distinction Robert Ressler made between a serial killer—one who continues killing over a long period, usually at regular intervals—and the ‘spree killer’, such as Charles Starkweather, Richard Speck or Paul John Knowles, who commits a number of murders in a sudden rampage over a brief period of time. Perhaps the best-known spree killer of the 1980s was Bernard Christopher Wilder, a young and wealthy Australian businessman and racing driver, who lived in luxury in Miami, Florida, from the mid-1970s. In 1980 he was charge with raping two teenage girls after drugging them with a doctored pizza, but was only bound over. Back in Australia he was charged with abducting and raping two 15-year-old girls, but allowed to return to America on bail. In the seven weeks between 26 February 1984 and 12 April 1984, Wilder drove from Florida to Georgia, then Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nevada and California, then returned east to Indiana, New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. During this time he abducted eleven women, posing as a magazine photographer looking for models, and raped and killed nine of them. On 20 March 1984, guests in a motel in Bainbridge, south Georgia, broke into a room when they heard a girl screaming, and found a 19-year-old girl who had locked herself in the bathroom. She described how she had been picked up in Tallahassee, Florida, by Wilder, who said he wanted her to model for him, and was knocked unconscious as she posed in a public garden. Wilder had then smuggled her into a motel room in a sleeping bag, glued her eyelids with superglue, bound her hands, then raped and tortured her. She had managed to persuade him to allow her to go to the bathroom, then locked herself in and screamed until she was released; Wilder fled.
Most of his other pickups were less fortunate. Only two girls, who were forced to spend a night with him in a motel in Akron, Ohio, escaped with their lives—one of them stabbed several times. In Boston, Wilder put the other on a plane for Los Angeles, handing her five hundred dollars, then abducted another girl whose car had broken down. She succeeded in jumping out of his car at a traffic light. The next day, Friday 13 April, two policemen approached Wilder’s car, and as one of them grappled with him, Wilder was fatally shot; the policeman was only wounded.
The nationwide chase after Wilder was one of the major factors that led to the formation of a nationwide crime centre, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) in Quantico in June, 1984. Here, as we have seen, the crime computer records crimes that take place all over America—which would formerly have been recorded only in the state in which they took place—and searches for similarities that might reveal a travelling criminal. Although difficulties have arisen in recent years—as individual states complain that the NCAVC takes the credit that is often due to them, and sometimes decline to co-operate—the NCAVC has remained the most important advance in crime detection in the late twentieth century.
The importance of these technological advances is emphasized again by the solution of another widely publicized case of the 1980s, that of the man who became known as ‘the Night Stalker.’
Throughout 1985 handgun sales in Los Angeles soared. Many suburbanites slept with a loaded pistol by their beds. A series of violent attacks upon citizens in their own homes had shattered the comfortable normality of middle-class life. Formerly safe neighbourhoods seemed to be the killer’s favourite targets. The whole city was terrified.
The attacks were unprecedented in many ways. Neither murder nor robbery seemed to be the obvious motive, although both frequently took place. The killer would break into a house, creep into the main bedroom and shoot the male partner through the head with a .22. He would then rape and beat the wife or girlfriend, suppressing resistance with threats of violence to her or her children. Male children were sometimes sodomized, the rape victims sometimes shot. On occasion he would ransack the house looking for valuables while at other times he would leave empty-handed without searching. During the attacks he would force victims to declare their love for Satan. Survivors described a tall, slim Hispanic male with black, greasy hair and severely decayed teeth. The pattern of crimes seemed to be based less upon a need to murder or rape but a desire to terrify and render helpless. More than most serial killers the motive seemed to be exercising power.
The killer also had unusual methods of victim selection. He seemed to be murdering outside his own racial group, preferring Caucasians and specifically Asians. He also seemed to prefer to break into yellow houses.
In the spring and summer of 1985 there were more than twenty attacks, most of which involved both rape and murder. By the end of March the press had picked up the pattern and splashed stories connecting the series of crimes. After several abortive nicknames, such as ‘The Walk-In Killer’ or ‘The Valley Invader’, the Herald Examiner came up with ‘The Night Stalker’, a name sensational enough to stick.
Thus all through the hot summer of 1985 Californians slept with their windows closed. One policeman commented to a reporter: ‘People are armed and staying up late. Burglars want this guy caught like everyone else. He’s making it bad for their business.’ The police themselves circulated sketches and stopped anyone who looked remotely like The Night Stalker. One innocent man was stopped five times.
Despite these efforts and thorough forensic analysis of crime scenes there was little progress in the search for the killer’s identity.
Things were obviously getting difficult for The Night Stalker as well. The next murder that fitted the pattern occurred in San Francisco, showing perhaps that public awareness in Los Angeles had made it too taxing a location. This shift also gave police a chance to search San Francisco hotels for records of a man of The Night Stalker’s description. Sure enough, while checking the downmarket Tenderloin district police learned that a thin Hispanic with bad teeth had been staying at a cheap hotel there periodically over the past year. On the last occasion he had checked out the night of the San Francisco attack. The manager commented that his room ‘smelted like a skunk’ each time he vacated it and it took three days for the smell to clear.
Though this evidence merely confirmed the police’s earlier description, The Night Stalker’s next shift of location was to prove more revealing. A young couple in Mission Viejo were attacked in their home. The Night Stalker shot the man through the head while he slept, then raped his partner on the bed next to the body. He then tied her up while he ransacked the house for money and jewellery. Before leaving he raped her a second time and force her to fellate him with a gun pressed against her head. Unfortunately for the killer, however, his victim caught a glimpse of him escaping in a battered orange Toyota and memorized the licence plate. She immediately alerted the police. LAPD files showed that the car had been stolen in Los Angeles’ Chinatown district while the owner was eating in a restaurant. An all-points bulletin was put out for the vehicle, and officers were instructed not to try and arrest the driver, merely to observe him. However, the car was not found. In fact, The Night Stalker had dumped the car soon after the attack, and it was located two days later in a car park in Los Angeles’ Rampart district. After plain clothes officers had kept the car under surveillance for twenty-four hours, the police moved in and took the car away for forensic testing. A set of fingerprints was successfully lifted.
Searching police fingerprint files for a match manually can take many days and even then it is possible to miss correlations. However, the Los Angeles police had recently installed a fingerprint database computer system, designed by the FBI, and it was through this that they checked the set of fingerprints from the orange Toyota. The system works by storing information about the relative distance between different features of a print, and comparing them with a digitized image of the suspect’s fingerprint. The search provided a positive match and a photograph. The Night Stalker was a petty thief and burglar. His name was Ricardo Leyva Ramirez.
The positive identification was described by the forensic division as ‘a near miracle’. The computer system had only just been installed, this was one of its first trials. Furthermore, the system only contained the fingerprints of criminals born after 1 January 1960. Richard Ramirez was born in February 1960.
The police circulated the photograph to newspapers, and it was shown on the late evening news. At the time, Ramirez was in Phoenix, buying cocaine with the money he had stolen in Mission Viejo. On the morning that the papers splashed his name and photograph all over their front pages, he was on a bus on the way back to Los Angeles, unaware that he had been identified.
He arrived safely and went into the bus station toilet to finish off the cocaine he had bought. No one seemed to be overly interested in him as he left the station and walked through Los Angeles. Ramirez was a Satanist, and had developed a belief that Satan himself watched over him, preventing his capture.
At 8.15 a.m. Ramirez entered Tito’s Liquor Store at 819 Towne Avenue. He selected some Pepsi and a pack of sugared doughnuts; he had a sweet tooth that, coupled with a lack of personal hygiene, had left his mouth with only a few blackened teeth. At the counter other customers looked at him strangely as he produced three dollar bills and awaited his change. Suddenly he noticed the papers’ front pages, and his faith in Satan’s power must have been shaken. He dodged out of the shop and ran, accompanied by shouts of, ‘It is him! Call the cops!’ He pounded off down the street at a surprising speed for one so ostensibly unhealthy. Within twelve minutes he had covered two miles. He had headed east. He was in the Hispanic district of Los Angeles.
Ever since the police had confirmed that The Night Stalker was Hispanic there had been a great deal of anger among the Hispanic community of Los Angeles. They felt that racial stereotypes were already against them enough without their being associated with psychopaths. Thus more than most groups, Hispanics wanted The Night Stalker out of action.
Ramirez, by now, was desperate to get a vehicle. He attempted to pull a woman from her car in a supermarket lot until he was chased away by some customers of the barber’s shop opposite. He carried on running, though exhausted, into the more residential areas of east Los Angeles. There, he tried to steal a 1966 red Mustang having failed to notice that the owner, Faustino Pinon was lying underneath repairing it. As Ramirez attempted to start the car Pinon grabbed him by the collar and tried to pull him from the driver’s seat. Ramirez shouted that he had a gun, but Pinon carried on pulling at him even after the car had started, causing it to career into the gatepost. Ramirez slammed it into reverse and accelerated into the side of Pinon’s garage, and the vehicle stalled. Pinon succeeded in wrenching Ramirez out of his car, but in the following struggle Ramirez escaped, leaping the fence and running off across the road. There he tried to wrestle Angelina De La Torres from her Ford Granada. ‘Te voy a matar!’ (I’m going to kill you!) screamed Ramirez, ‘Give me the keys!’, but again he was thwarted and he ran away, now pursued by a growing crowd of neighbours. Manuel De La Torres, Angelina’s husband, succeeded in smashing Ramirez on the head with a gate bar and he fell, but he managed to struggle up and set off running again before he could be restrained. Incredibly, when Ramirez had developed a lead, he stopped, turned around and stuck his tongue out at his pursuers, then sped off once more. His stamina could not hold indefinitely however, and it was De La Torres who again tackled him and held him down. It is possible that Ramirez would have been lynched there and then had not a patrolman called to the scene arrived: Coincidentally the patrolman was the same age as the killer, and he too was called Ramirez. He reached the scene just as The Night Stalker disappeared under the mob. He drove his patrol car to within a few feet of where Ramirez was restrained, got out and prepared to handcuff the captive.
‘Save me. Please. Thank God you’re here. It’s me, I’m the one you want. Save me before they kill me,’ babbled Ramirez. The patrolman handcuffed him and pushed him into the back of the car. The crowd was becoming restless, and the car was kicked as it pulled away. Sixteen-year-old Felipe Castaneda, part of the mob that captured Ramirez remarked, ‘He should never, never have come to East LA. He might have been a tough guy, but he came to a tough neighbourhood. He was Hispanic. He should have known better.’
‘The Night Stalker’ was in custody, at first in a police holding cell and then in Los Angeles county jail. While in police care he repeatedly admitted to being ‘The Night Stalker’ and begged to be killed.
The case against Ramirez was strong. The murder weapon, a .22 semi-automatic pistol, was found in the possession of a woman in Tijuana, who had been given it by a friend of Ramirez. Police also tried to track down some of the jewellery that Ramirez had stolen and fenced, by sending investigators to his birth-place El Paso, a spiralling town on the Texas-Mexico border. Questioning of his family and neighbours revealed that Ramirez’ early life had been spent in petty theft and smoking a lot of marijuana. He had never joined any of the rival teenage gangs that fight over territory throughout El Paso, preferring drugs and listening to heavy metal. It had been common knowledge that Ramirez was a Satanist; a boyhood friend, Tom Ramos, said he believed that it was Bible-study classes that had turned the killer that way.
The investigators also found a great deal of jewellery, stashed at the house of Ramirez’ sister Rosa Flores. The police were also hoping to find a pair of eyes that Ramirez had gouged from one of his victims that had not been found in any previous searches. Unfortunately they were not recovered.
The evidence against Ramirez now seemed unequivocal. In a controversial move, the Mayor of Los Angeles said that whatever went on in court, he was convinced of Ramirez’ guilt. This was later to prove a mainstay in a defence argument that Ramirez could not receive a fair trial in Los Angeles.
The appointed chief prosecutor in the case was deputy District Attorney P. Philip Halpin, who had prosecuted the ‘Onion Field’ cop-killing case twenty years earlier. Halpin hoped to end the trial and have Ramirez in the gas chamber in a relatively short period of time. The prosecutor drew up a set of initial charges and submitted them as quickly as possible. A public defender was appointed to represent Ramirez. However Ramirez’ family had engaged an El Paso lawyer, Manuel Barraza, and Ramirez eventually rejected his appointed public defender in favour of the El Paso attorney. Barraza did not even have a licence to practise law in California.
Ramirez accepted, then rejected three more lawyers, finally settling upon two defenders, Dan and Arturo Hernandez. The two were not related, although they often worked together. The judge advised Ramirez that his lawyers did not even meet the minimum requirements for trying a death-penalty case in California, but Ramirez insisted, and more than seven weeks after the initial charges were filed, pleas of ‘not guilty’ were entered on all counts.
The Hernandez’ and Ramirez seemed to be trying to force Halpin into making a mistake out of sheer frustration, and thus to create a mis-trial. After each hearing the Hernandez’ made pleas for, and obtained, more time to prepare their case. Meanwhile one prosecution witness had died of natural causes, and Ramirez’ appearance was gradually changing. He had had his hair permed, and his rotten teeth replaced. This naturally introduced more uncertainty into the minds of prosecution witnesses as to Ramirez’ identity. The racial make-up of the jury was contested by the defence, which caused delays. The defence also argued, with some justification, that Ramirez could not receive a fair trial in Los Angeles, and moved for a change of location. Although the motion was refused it caused yet more delays. It actually took three and a half years for Ramirez’ trial finally to get underway.
Halpin’s case was, in practical terms, unbeatable. The defence’s only real possibility of success was in infinite delay. For the first three weeks of the trial events progressed relatively smoothly. Then Daniel Hernandez announced that the trial would have to be postponed as he was suffering from nervous exhaustion. He had a doctor’s report that advised six weeks’ rest with psychological counselling. It seemed likely that a mis-trial would be declared. Halpin tried to argue that Arturo Hernandez could maintain the defence, even though he had failed to turn up at the hearings and trial for the first seven months. However this proved unnecessary as the judge made a surprise decision and denied Daniel Hernandez his time off, arguing that he had failed to prove a genuine need.
Halpin, by this stage, was actually providing the Hernandez’ with all the information that they required to mount an adequate defence, in order to move things along and prevent mis-trial. For the same reasons the judge eventually appointed a defence co-counsel, Ray Clark. Clark immediately put the defence on a new track: Ramirez was the victim of a mistaken identity. He even developed an acronym for this defence—SODDI or Some Other Dude Did It. When the defence case opened Clark produced testimony from Ramirez’ father that he had been in El Paso at the time of one of the murders of which he was accused. He also criticized the prosecution for managing to prove that footprints at one of the crime scenes were made by a size eleven-and-a-half Avia trainer without ever proving that Ramirez actually owned such a shoe. When the jury finally left to deliberate however, it seemed clear that they would find Ramirez guilty.
Things were not quite that easy however. After thirteen days of deliberation juror Robert Lee was dismissed for inattention and replaced by an alternative who had also witnessed the case. Two days later, juror Phyllis Singletary was murdered in a domestic dispute. Her live-in lover had beaten her, then shot her several times. She was also replaced.
At last on 20 September, 1989 after twenty-two days of deliberation the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all thirteen counts of murder, twelve of those in the first degree. The jury also found Ramirez guilty of thirty other felonies, including burglary, rape, sodomy and attempted murder. Asked by reporters how he felt after the verdict, Ramirez replied, ‘Evil.’
There remained only the selection of sentence. At the hearing Clark argued that Ramirez might actually have been possessed by the devil, or that alternatively he had been driven to murder by over-active hormones. He begged the jury to imprison Ramirez for life rather than put him on death row. If the jury agreed, Clark pointed out, ‘he will never see Disneyland again’, surely punishment enough. After five further days of deliberation, the jury voted for the death penalty. Again, reporters asked Ramirez how he felt about the outcome as he was being taken away, ‘Big deal. Death always went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland.’
Any attempt to trace the source of Ramirez’ violent behaviour runs up against an insurmountable problem. No external traumas or difficulties seem to have brutalized him. He had a poor upbringing, he was part of a racial minority, but these things alone cannot explain such an incredibly sociopathic personality. Ramirez seems to have created himself. He was an intelligent and deeply religious child and early teenager. Having decided at some stage that counter-culture and drug-taking provided a more appealing lifestyle, he developed pride in his separateness. In the El Paso of his early manhood, people would lock their doors, if they saw him coming down the street. He was known as ‘Ricky Rabon’, Ricky the thief, a nickname he enjoyed as he felt it made him ‘someone’. By the time he moved to Los Angeles, he was injecting cocaine and probably committing burglaries to support himself. He let his teeth rot away, eating only childish sugary foods. He refused to wash. He listened to loud heavy metal music.
It has been argued that it was his taste in music that drove him to murder and Satanism, but this would seem to be more part of the mood of censorship sweeping America than a genuine explanation. Anyone who takes the trouble to listen to the music in question, particularly the AC/DC album cited by American newspapers at the time of the murders, will find that there is little in it to incite violence.
Ramirez’ obvious attempts to repel others in his personal behaviour, and his heavy drug use, seem more likely sources of violence than early poverty or music. His assumed ‘otherness’ seems in retrospect sadly underdeveloped, having never progressed beyond a teenager’s need to appal staid grown-up society.
This is not to say that Ramirez was unintelligent. His delaying of his trial and his choice of the Hernandez’ to continue the delays shows that he had worked out the most effective method of staying alive for the longest period either before or soon after he was captured. His remarks in court upon being sentenced were not particularly original, yet they are clearly expressed:
‘It’s nothing you’d understand but I do have something to say…I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society. I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards—truly trematodes of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession. You maggots make me sick—hypocrites one and all…I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil, legions of the night, night breed, repeat not the errors of the Night Prowler [a name from an AC/DC song] and show no mercy. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within us all. That’s it.
Ramirez remains on Death Row. It is unlikely that he will be executed before the year 2000.
The kind of good fortune that led to the arrest of Ramirez—the single fingerprint that identified the killer—failed to favour the team who spent most of the 1980s trying to trap the sadist who became known as the Green River Killer.
On 12 August 1982, a slaughterman gazing into the slow-flowing Green River, near Seattle, was intrigued by the mass of bubbles surrounding a log—they suggested a decomposing animal. He strolled down a fisherman’s track to the riverbank for a closer look. What he saw was a bloated female corpse that had come to rest against a broken tree trunk. The shoulder-length auburn hair floated on the surface.
The police pathologist succeeded in lifting an excellent set of prints from the swollen flesh. These enabled the criminal identification department to name the victim as 23-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner, known as ‘Dub’; she was a stripper with a list of convictions as a prostitute.
The man in charge of the case, Detective Dave Reichert, recalled that a month earlier, another tattooed corpse had been found in the Green River, half a mile downstream, strangled with her own slacks. The girl had been identified as 16-year-old Wendy Coffield. In spite of her age, Wendy had a record as a prostitute—in fact, as a ‘trick roll’, someone who set up her clients (‘johns’) for robbery. It was a dangerous game, and Reichert was not surprised that the investigation had failed to turn up a likely suspect. On the whole, he decided, it was unlikely that the two murders were connected.
This view was reinforced by a visit to Dub Bonner’s parents in nearby Tacoma. It produced the information that Dub had vanished on 25 July 1982, three weeks earlier, after being bailed from the local jail, together with her drug-dealing pimp. There was, it seemed a possible suspect—another dealer who had threatened Dub Bonner’s life unless her pimp paid a drug-debt.
But before he had time to follow this lead, Reichert heard the news that two more bodies had been found in the Green River. The call came just after he had returned from church—it was Sunday, 15 August 1982—and when Reichert arrived at the scene, they had still not been taken out of the water. Both women were black, both were naked, and they had been weighted down to the river bottom with large rocks. But what made Reichert swear under his breath was that they were only a few hundred yards upstream from the spot where Dub Bonner had been found three days earlier, and that they had almost certainly been there at the time. Reichert had searched up and downstream for clues—but not, apparently, far enough.
Determined not to repeat his error, Reichert tramped along the bank towards the place where Dub Bonner had been found. He was hoping to find the route that the killer had used to transport the bodies. What he found, in fact, was another body. This one lay face downward, and the cause of death was clearly the pair of slacks knotted around her neck. Her upper half was clothed, although her bra had been pulled up to release her breasts. Like the other two, she was black. The out-thrust tongue and the shocked expression on her face showed that death had not come easily.
Reichert’s Superior, Major Richard Kraske of the Kings County CID, came to view the bodies, and Reichert described what he had learned about Dub Bonner. This led them to toy with the idea that these women might be victims of a gang war among pimps; then Kraske discounted it. Pimps were unlikely to destroy their means of livelihood. It seemed far more likely that they were dealing with a psychopath—a ‘sick trick’—whose perverted needs involved the total domination of his sex-partner, and her final destruction. Reichert recalled gloomily that he had investigated the murder of another prostitute, Leann Wilcox, in March of that same year. Her body had been found miles from the river, but cause of death—strangulation—seemed to fit the pattern.
The medical report on the latest victims deepened his depression. Of the two bodies in the river, one had been immersed for a week, the other for only two or three days. That meant that the killer had returned to the river since Dub Bonner had been found. Moreover, the body found on the bank still showed signs of rigor mortis, the stiffening of the muscles which usually disappears within two days. So the killer had returned—as many killers do to the sites where they have dumped bodies. He must have heard the news of the discovery of Dub Bonner’s body, yet he had still returned. And if the police had kept a watch on the riverbank, he would now be in custody…
It was the first of a series of mischances that would make this one of the most frustrating criminal cases in Seattle’s history. The next—and perhaps the worst—occurred two days later, when a local TV station announced that the riverbank was now under round-the-clock surveillance, and dashed the last hope of catching the killer on a return visit…
During the course of the next few days, the three black victims were identified. The first was Marcia Faye Chapman, a 31-year-old prostitute and mother of three children. She was known to work ‘the Strip’, the motel-studded highway that ran south from Seattle to the airport and on to Tacoma. The method was to stand by the roadside, apparently ‘hitching’. If a car pulled up, and the driver indicated his willingness to go to a ‘party’, he was taken to a cheap motel, or to an area of condemned houses north of the airport, where his needs could be satisfied in the car. With the expansion of the ‘Sea-Tac’ Airport’s traffic in the 1970s, the Strip had also seen a spectacular expansion in prostitution, and the crimes that go with it. Marcia Chapman had been missing since 1 August 1982, when she told her children she was going to the store, and had failed to return.
The second body found in the river was that of 17-year-old Cynthia Hinds, another prostitute who worked the Strip; she had last been seen on 11 August, not far from where Marcia Chapman had disappeared. The third body—the one found on the bank—was that of 16-year-old Opal Mills, a half-caste girl with no record of prostitution, but with a background of quarrels at home and minor brushes with the police. After viewing her daughter’s body, Kathy Mills was haunted by the ‘silent scream’ on her face. She was to campaign for more police activity, and to intensify the frustration that turned this case into a nightmare for investigating officers.
But it was the medical findings on Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds that confirmed the suspicion that the Green River Killer was a ‘sick trick’; both women had pointed rocks jammed into their vaginas. There was speculation that they had been dumped in clear water, with their feet weighted by stones, so that the killer could go back and look at their faces magnified by the water. Intact sperm was found in the vaginas of all three victims. Opal Mills’s body was scraped and scratched—probably from being dragged over the ground; it looked as if the killer had been interrupted before he could throw her in the river.
In cases involving the murder of prostitutes, investigators are faced with the baffling problem of where to begin. Approximately eighty thousand cars a day drive along the Strip, making eighty thousand possible suspects. Since the contact that led to the murder is made by chance, there is no logical starting point. Vice squad detectives tried questioning prostitutes about ‘johns’ who had acted suspiciously, and undercover agents hung around bars frequented by pimps, hoping to pick up rumours of ‘sick tricks’. They heard many stories of women who had been half-strangled in motel rooms, or who had been driven to remote spots and then raped at gunpoint. Dozens of suspects were questioned, including the drug-dealing pimp who had threatened to kill Dub Bonner; all had to be released.
Meanwhile, more girls were disappearing. Two days after Wendy Coffield’s body had been found in the Green River, a 17-year-old prostitute named Giselle Lavvorn vanished on her beat along the Strip. On Saturday 28 August 1982, a prostitute named Kase Lee left her pimp’s apartment to ‘turn a trick’, and vanished. The next day it was Terri Milligan, who took an hour off from soliciting to go for a meal; apparently a car pulled up for her as she walked to the fast-food joint, and, unwilling to reject business, she climbed in.
The following day, 15-year-old Debra Estes—known to the police as Betty Jones—was picked up by a john in a blue and white pickup truck; he drove her to a remote spot, made her undress at gun point, then ordered her to give him a ‘blow job’. After that he robbed her of $75 and left her in some woods with her hands tied. This man was pulled in by police who recognized the description of his pickup truck, and identified as the attacker. But a lie-detector test established his innocence of the Green River murders. In fact, while he was still in custody, 18-year-old Mary Meehan, who was eight months pregnant, disappeared, and became victim No. 9.
Ironically, within three weeks of her unpleasant encounter, Debra Estes would become the tenth victim of the real Green River Killer. Six more victims in August, October, November and December would bring his total up to at least sixteen—the largest annual total for any American serial killer up to that time.
Yet, as strange as it sounds, the American public was already beginning to lose interest in the Green River Killer. This was partly because the killer’s standard method—strangling or suffocation—failed to produce the same shock effect as the mutilations of Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Killer. But it was also because this apparently endless disappearance of prostitutes led to a certain attention-fatigue—in March 1983, Alma Smith and Delores Williams; in April, Gail Mathews, Andrea Childers, Sandra Gabbert and Kimi-Kai Pitsor.
Moreover, there was a monotonous similarity about the cases. It was on 17 April that 17-year-old Sandy Gabbert picked up a ‘trick’ and vanished. Only an hour later, 17-year-old Kimi-Kai Pitsor was walking with her pimp when a pockmarked man driving a green pickup truck caught her eye; she climbed in and vanished. Presumably the same man abducted and killed both girls on the same evening. Yet they were not even reported missing to the police for several weeks.
This attention-fatigue could also explain one of the oddest episodes in the case. On 30 April, 18-year-old Marie Malvar and her ‘boyfriend’ were walking along the Strip when a man in a pickup truck signalled for her to get in. The boyfriend, Bobby Woods, followed in his own car, but lost them; Marie vanished. A few days later, accompanied by Marie’s father and brother, Bobby Woods spent hours driving around the area where he had last seen her. In a driveway in a cul-de-sac, he saw a pickup truck that he was certain was the one in which she had last been seen. The police were notified, and called at the house. But when the man who answered the door told them there was no woman in the house, they simply went away. To Bobby Woods it looked as if the police, like the general public, were losing interest in the case: a conclusion that seems to be supported by a subsequent development. On 17 May, Marie Malvar’s driving licence was found by a cleaner at the airport. It could well have contained the killer’s fingerprints. Yet although the police were notified, nobody bothered to collect the licence, and it was routinely destroyed six months later.
And the disappearances continued: in May, Carol Christensen, Martina Authorlee, Cheryl Wims and Yvonne Antosh; in June, Keli McGinness, Constance Naon, Tammy Lies and Carrie Roice; in July, Kelly Ware and Tina Thompson. Now the killer seemed to have abandoned the river as a dumping ground, preferring remote areas. Sometimes the girl vanished for ever. Sometimes bodies were found that corresponded to none of the known victims.
Photographs of the women often show sullen and defeated faces, and eyes that seem glazed with drugs. Kathy Mills, mother of Opal Mills, paraded with a placard that pointed out that the killer of a policeman’s daughter was arrested the next day, while the attitude of the police towards the Green River victims was: ‘Too bad.’ It was not an entirely fair comment, but she had a point. By the end of 1983, the number of the killer’s known victims had reached forty, with another seven unaccounted for.
In fact, the police were about to step up the pace of the investigation. In mid-January 1984 they announced the formation of a Green River Task Force that would be devoted entirely to catching the killer. It was led by an experienced detective, Captain Frank Adamson, and its chief consultant was special investigator Bob Keppel, of the Attorney-General’s office, the man who had played a major role in tracking down serial killer Ted Bundy. The team included undercover officers who watched prostitutes on the Strip and followed them as they drove off with johns. Dozens of sheepish or angry men were interviewed and asked for identification, and the suspect file continued to swell. And prostitutes who had taken customers to a dead-end road not far from where three skeletons had been discovered continued to be defiant, and to insist that they could look after themselves.
In April 1984, three more skeletons were found near Star Lake, south of Sea-Tac Airport, and another in woods about a mile away. One of these finds presented a new puzzle to the investigators. It was identified as that of Amina Agisheff, who had been missing since 7 July 1982, and was therefore one of the earliest—perhaps the first—of the Green River victims. But Amina did not fit the pattern. She was 35 years old, had two children, worked as waitress, and had no record of prostitution. She had vanished towards midnight as she left her mother to catch a bus. Had she been kidnapped? Or had she been given a lift by someone she knew—someone who turned out to be the Green River killer? It now struck the police as a real possibility that there were two Green River killers, one who dumped his victims in the river, and one who left them on land.
The first step was to investigate Amina Agisheff’s background to find a potential killer. The next was to get the crime analysis unit to look back over the past ten years or so, to try to find earlier murders that might be linked to the series. Few mass murderers begin in full spate, so to speak; many have records for lesser sex crimes. The Green River killer might be caught by some earlier crime that had not been recognized as his handiwork…But, like so many other promising approaches, these led nowhere.
March 21,1984, is a highly significant date in the Green River case. On that day, a man working on a sports field north of the airport recognized a bone in his dog’s mouth as a human leg bone. A female skeleton was found in nearby bushes. Close by, a police bloodhound found a second skeleton. On that same day, 17-year-old Cindy Ann Smith, a topless dancer and prostitute, vanished, like so many other girls, while hitch-hiking along the Strip. There was one significant difference. As far as we know, Cindy Smith was the last victim of the Green River Killer.
In mid-March of the following year, 1985, the head of the Green River Task Force announced what the general public had guessed for many months: that the murders seemed to have ceased.
But the investigation continued in top gear. By midsummer, Seattle police suspected that the Green River killer had moved south to Portland, Oregon, just over the state border from Washington. Four young prostitutes had vanished; their bodies were found in remote and lonely areas. Then, on 14 July 1985, a young prostitute named Lottie was held at knifepoint by a pudgy customer who bound and blindfolded her, and drove her in his van down the freeway. Desperation gave her the strength to gnaw through her bonds; she tried to grab the knife and the van went into a ditch. Passing drivers seized the abductor. He proved to be Richard Terry Horton, a navy veteran. Triumphant detectives were convinced they had the Green River killer; but Horton’s record showed he had been at sea during many of the Green River murders. He was sentenced to two years for kidnapping.
In January 1985, following the discovery of two skeletons near the Mountain View Cemetery, Captain Adamson allowed himself the optimistic prediction that the killer would be caught in 1986. He clearly had a suspect in mind. On 6 February, a trapper named Ernest McLean was arrested. He had a record for burglary, and police survey teams had followed him to many spots where human bones had been found. But McLean insisted that he had been in these places merely to trap animals for their fur. When a lie-detector test indicated his innocence, he was released. In May 1986, the resources of the Green River Task Force were severely cut.
In September 1987, Seattle newspapers asked: ‘Is the Green River Killer Back?’ Sixteen-year-old Rosie Kurran, a ‘mixed-up youngster’ who had been given up by her parents as uncontrollable, left home on 26 August, and vanished. Her body was found in a plastic bag in a ditch a week later. In November and December, two more girls, 14-year-old Debbie Gonsales and 24-year-old Dorothea Prestleigh, also vanished. The police declined to put these women on the list of Green River victims. And, to their relief, time seemed to prove them correct.
December 7, 1988, was another crucial date in the Green River case. On that evening, a two-hour TV documentary on the killings was broadcast: Murder Live: A Chance to End the Nightmare. The public was asked to ring in with information; within minutes of the start of the programme, the switchboard was deluged; in two days, a hundred thousand people had called. It looked as if, once again, the investigation was going to be swamped with too many suspects.
One of these tips stood out above the rest. In 1981, a man named William Jay Stevens II, serving a sentence for burglary, had walked out of an open prison, and vanished. It seemed that he had spent much of that time in Spokane, Washington. He had a degree in psychology, had been in the Military Police, and was known to have an obsession about police insignia and uniforms. (It had been suggested many times that the Green River killer may have enticed his victims away by posing as a police officer.)
A check by the Spokane police on Stevens’ whereabouts during the period of the Green River murders seemed to confirm that he could be the killer. On 9 January 1989, Stevens was arrested at his parents’ home in Spokane. Police seized a large number of firearms, a box full of photographs of nude women, several driving licences and credit cards under false names, as well as stolen credit cards. Former friends of Stevens testified that he had frequented the red-light areas of Seattle and shown a deep interest in the Green River case. When stolen items of police equipment were also found, neither the police nor the media had any doubt that Stevens was the Green River Killer. He had even bought a house in Tigard—with stolen money—near which remains of two dead women were found.
The euphoria began to collapse when a study of Stevens’ credit cards revealed that he was undoubtedly elsewhere at the time of some of the murders. It was still of course, possible that he might have been guilty of the others. But in October 1989, Captain Bob Evans, the new commander of the Task Force, announced that he had cleared Stevens of involvement in the Green River murders.
Seven and a half years after the murders began, the police had admitted that the expenditure of $12 million, interviews with 15,000 suspects, and the use of a $200,000 computer had left them virtually where they had been at the beginning—when a careless news broadcast had destroyed the main hope of catching the killer in the act.
The anticlimax pleased nobody; but there was at least one consolation: the activities of this sexual predator had turned the Seattle police department into one of the most efficient and up-to-date in the United States.
After Corll, Gacy, Lake and the Green River Killer, it seemed unlikely that any American sex killer would ever again produce quite the same effect of shock on the American psyche. But in 1991, a 31-year-old white male disproved that notion with a series of murders that revived disturbing memories of the Wisconsin necrophile Ed Gein.
On the evening of 22 July, as a police patrol car was cruising along 25th Street, Milwaukee, a cry of ‘Help!’ made the driver brake to an abrupt halt. A slim black man was running towards them, and a handcuff was dangling from his left wrist. His relief when he saw the police car was almost hysterical, and the tale he babbled out sounded so extraordinary that the officers had difficulty in following it. All they could gather was that a madman had been trying to kill him. The policemen climbed out of car and accompanied the man—who gave his name as Tracy Edwards—to the white low-rise building called Oxford Apartments, a rooming house occupied almost exclusively by blacks.
The tall, good-looking young man who answered the door of room 213 had sandy hair and was white. As he stood aside politely to let them in, he seemed perfectly calm, and looked at Edwards as if he had never seen him before. Both policemen had a feeling that this was a false alarm—until they smelt the unpleasant odour of decay, not unlike bad fish, that pervaded the apartment.
When they asked the man—who gave his name as Jeffrey Dahmer—why he had threatened Tracy Edwards, he looked contrite, and explained that he had just lost his job, and had been drinking. They asked him for the key to the handcuff, and Dahmer suddenly looked nervous and tried to stall. When they insisted, his calm vanished, and he suddenly became hysterical. There was a brief struggle, and another resident heard one of the policemen say: ‘The son of a bitch scratched me.’ Moments later, Dahmer was face down on the floor in handcuffs, and his rights were being read to him.
The policeman called headquarters on his portable radio, and asked them to run a check on the prisoner; the answer came back quickly: Dahmer had a felony conviction for sexual assault and for enticing a 13-year-old boy.
That supported the story that Edwards—now able to speak calmly—went on to tell them. The 32-year-old Edwards, a recent arrival from Mississippi, had met Dahmer about four hours ago in a shopping mall in Grand Avenue. He had accepted Dahmer’s invitation to go back to his apartment for a party.
Edwards did not like the smell of Dahmer’s small apartment, nor the male pin-ups on the walls—his own preference was for women. But he was fascinated by a fish tank containing Siamese fighting fish. Dahmer told him he liked to watch them fighting, and that the combat invariably ended with one of them dead. They sat on the settee and drank beer, then rum and coke. Edwards found himself feeling oddly sleepy. But when Dahmer tried to embrace him, Edwards suddenly came awake and and announced that he was going.
Seconds later, a handcuff had snapped around one of his wrists. He began to struggle, and Dahmer’s attempt to handcuff the other cuff was unsuccessful. And for the next hour, Edwards sat on Dahmer’s bed and watched a video of The Exorcist, while Dahmer held a large butcher’s knife against his chest.
Finally Dahmer grew tired of the video and told Edwards that he intended to cut his heart out and eat it. But first he was going to strip Edwards and take some photographs…As Dahmer stood up to get the camera, the prisoner seized his opportunity; he swung his right fist in a punch that knocked Dahmer sideways; then he kicked him in the stomach and ran for the door. Dahmer caught him up there, and offered to unlock the handcuff; Edwards ignored him, wrenched open the door, and fled for his life…
When Edwards had finished telling his story, he was told to wait outside in the hallway, which was crowded with curious neighbours. As they tried to peer into the room, one of them saw a policeman open the door of the refrigerator, and gasp: ‘There’s a goddam head in here.’
That was the moment Dahmer began to scream—a horrible, unearthly scream like an animal. One of the policemen rushed downstairs for shackles. When the writhing body was secure, the two policemen began their search of the apartment.
Within minutes, they realized that they had discovered a mixture of a slaughterhouse and torture chamber. The freezer compartment of the refrigerator contained meat in plastic bags, one of which looked ominously like a human heart. Another freezer contained three plastic bags, each one with a severed head inside. A filing cabinet contained three skulls—some painted grey—and some bones; a box contained two more skulls, and an album full of more gruesome photographs. Two more skulls were found in a kettle, while another contained some severed hands and a male genital organ. The blue plastic barrel proved to contain three male torsos. An electric saw stained with blood made it clear how Dahmer had dismembered his victims. There was also a large vat of acid.
Journalists and TV crews were soon outside the apartment, and before midday, the people of America had learned that Milwaukee was the scene of the latest outbreak of homosexual serial murder. According to Dahmer, who confessed freely soon after his arrest, he had killed less than Dean Corll or John Gacy—only seventeen. But then, there was a major difference; Dahmer was a cannibal. The plastic bags of meat in the freezer were intended to be eaten. He described how he had fried the biceps of one victim in vegetable oil. The threat to eat Tracy Edwards’ heart had been no bluff. Dahmer had little food in the apartment but potato chips, human meat and a jar of mustard.
Back at police headquarters, Dahmer was obviously relieved to be co-operating; he seemed glad that his career of murder was over. The police learned how, as a child, he had been fascinated by dissecting animals. Then, when he was 18 years old, in 1978, he had killed his first male victim, a hitch-hiker, then masturbated over the body. It had been almost ten years before he committed his next murder. But recently, the rate of killing had accelerated—as it often does with serial killers—and there had been no fewer than three murders in the last two weeks. He had attempted to kill Tracy Edwards only three days after his last murder.
Dahmer was also able to help the police towards establishing the identities of the victims—which included twelve blacks, one Laotian, one Hispanic and three whites. Some of their names he remembered; the police had to work out the identities of others from identity cards found in Dahmer’s reeking apartment, and from photographs shown to parents of missing youths.
All Dahmer’s confessions were sensational; but the story of one teenage victim was so appalling that it created outrage around the world. Fourteen-year-old Laotian Konerak Sinthasomphone had met Dahmer in front of the same shopping mall where the killer was later to pick up Tracy Edwards; the boy agreed to return to Dahmer’s apartment to allow him to take a couple of photographs.
Unknown to Konerak, Dahmer was the man who had enticed and sexually assaulted his elder brother three years earlier. Dahmer had asked the 13-year-old boy back to his apartment in September 1988, and had slipped a powerful sleeping draught into his, then fondled him sexually. Somehow, the boy succeeded in staggering out into the street and back home. The police were notified, and Dahmer was charged with second-degree sexual assault and sentenced to a year in a correction programme, which allowed him to continue to work in a chocolate factory.
Now the younger brother Konerak found himself in the same apartment. He was also given drugged coffee, and then, when he was unconscious, stripped and raped. After that, Dahmer went out to buy some beer—he had been a heavy drinker since schooldays. On his way back to the apartment, Dahmer saw, to his horror, that his naked victim was talking to two black teenage girls, obviously begging for help. Dahmer hurried up and tried to grab the boy; the girls clung on to him. One of them succeeded in ringing the police, and two squad cars arrived within minutes. Three irritable police officers wanted to know what the trouble was about.
When Dahmer told them that the young man was his lover, that they lived together in the nearby apartments, and that they had merely had a quarrel, the policemen were inclined to believe him—he looked sober and Konerak looked drunk. So they left the youth in Dahmer’s apartment, to be strangled, violated and dismembered.
Back at District Three station house, the three policemen made their second mistake of the evening—they joked about the homosexual quarrel they had just broken up. But a tape recorder happened to be switched on, and when Dahmer was arrested two months later, and admitted to killing the Laotian boy, the tape was located and played on radio and television.
The public outcry that followed was not due simply to the tragic mistake made by three policemen. It was also because they had apparently preferred to believe Dahmer because he was white, and ignored Konerak because he was coloured—at least, that is how Milwaukees’s non-whites saw it. It had also been remarked that when Dahmer had been arrested, TV cameramen had been requested not to take pictures; someone in the crowd had shouted that if he had been black, they would have allowed the cameras down his throat. Again, when Dahmer appeared in court for the first time on 25 July, he was dressed in his own clothes, not in the orange prison uniform; this again was seen as deliberately favouring a white. The Dahmer case caused an unpleasant build-up of racial tension in Milwaukee, and police crossed their fingers that nothing would ignite race riots. Fortunately, nothing did.
The twelve charges read out in court all concerned men who had been murdered since Dahmer had moved into the Oxford Apartments in March 1988. But according to Dahmer, his first murder had taken place thirteen years earlier, at the home in Bath Township, in north-eastern Ohio, where he had grown up and gone to school. At the time, his parents were in the process of a bitter and messy divorce, both alleging cruelty and neglect. Jeffrey had already learned to take refuge in alcohol.
According to Dahmer’s confession, he had found himself alone in the family house at 4480 West Bath Road; his father had already left, and his mother and younger brother David were away visiting relatives. He had been left with no money, and very little food in the broken refrigerator. That evening, he explained, he decided to go out and look for some company.
It was not hard to find. A 19-year-old white youth, who had spent the day at a rock concert, was hitch-hiking home to attend his father’s birthday party. When an ancient Oldsmobile driven by someone who looked about his own age pulled up, the boy climbed in. They went back to Dahmer’s house and drank some beer, and talked about their lives. Dahmer found he liked his new friend immensely. But when the boy looked at the clock and said he had to go, Dahmer begged him to stay. The boy refused. So Dahmer picked up a dumbbell, struck him on the head, then strangled him. He then dragged the body to the crawl space under the house, and dismembered it with a carving knife. It sounds an impossible task for an 18-year-old, but Dahmer was not without experience—he had always had a morbid interest in dismembering animals.
He had wrapped up the body parts in plastic bags. But after a few days, the smell began to escape. Dahmer’s mother was due back soon, and was sure to notice the stench. He took the plastic bags out to the wood under cover of darkness and managed to dig a shallow grave—the soil was rock-hard. But even with the bags now underground, he still worried—children might notice the grave. So he dug them up again, stripped the flesh from the bones, and smashed up bones with a sledgehammer. He scattered them around the garden, and the property next door. When his mother returned a few days later, there was nothing to reveal that her son was now a killer.
Unfortunately, Dahmer was unable to recall the name of his victim. The Milwaukee police telephoned the police of Bath Township and asked them if they had a missing person case that dated from mid-1978. They had. On 18 June, a youth named Stephen Mark Hicks had left his home in Coventry Township to go to a rock concert. Friends had driven him there, and they agreed to rendezvous with him that evening to take him home. Hicks failed to turn up at the meeting place, and no trace of him was ever found. The family had offered a reward for information, hired a private detective, and even consulted a psychic.
The Bath Township police had two photographs of Stephen Hicks on file. When shown these, Dahmer said casually: ‘Yes, that’s him.’
In the crawl space under the house, a blood-detecting chemical called Luminol caused certain spots to glow in the dark; these proved to be human blood. Luminol sprayed on a concrete block caused a bloody handprint to appear. The following day, more bones and three human teeth were found. Dental records eventually revealed that they had belonged to Stephen Hicks.
Dahmer’s first murder was the most difficult to confirm. The remaining sixteen were much easier.
For nine years after killing Stephen Hicks, Dahmer kept his homicidal impulses under control. A period of three years in the army had ended with a discharge for drunkenness. After a short stay in Florida, he had moved in with his grandmother Catherine, in West Allis, south of Milwaukee. But he was still drinking heavily, and was in trouble with the police for causing a disturbance in a bar. His family was relieved when he at last found himself a job—in the Ambrosia Chocolate Company in Milwaukee.
Dahmer soon discovered Milwaukee’s gay bars, where he became known as a monosyllabic loner. But it was soon observed that he had a more sinister habit. He would sometimes engage a fellow customer in conversation, and offer him a drink. These drinking companions often ended up in a drugged coma. Yet Dahmer’s intention was clearly not to commit rape. He seemed to want to try out his drugs as a kind of experiment, to see how much he had to administer, and how fast they worked. But other patrons noticed, and when one of Dahmer’s drinking companions ended up unconscious in hospital, the owner of Club Bath Milwaukee told him that he was barred.
On 8 September 1986, two 12-year-old boys reported to the police that Dahmer had exposed himself to them and masturbated. Dahmer alleged that he had merely been urinating. He was sentenced to a year on probation, and told his probation officers, with apparently sincerity: ‘I’ll never do it again.’ (Judges and probation officers were later to note that Dahmer had a highly convincing manner of donning the sackcloth and ashes.) This period ended on 9 September 1987.
A year of good behaviour had done nothing to alleviate Dahmer’s psychological problems; on the contrary, they had built up resentment and frustration. Six days after his probation ended, the frustration again exploded into murder. On 15 September, Dahmer was drinking at a gay hang-out called Club 219, and met a 24-year-old man called Stephen Tuomi. They decided to go to bed, and adjourned to the Ambassador Hotel, where they took a room that cost $43.88 for the night. Dahmer claims that he cannot recall much of that night, admitting that they drank themselves into a stupor. When Dahmer woke up, he says Tuomi was dead, with blood coming from his mouth, and strangulation marks on this throat.
Alone in a hotel room with a corpse, and the desk clerk likely to investigate whether the room had been vacated at any moment, Dahmer solved the problem by going out and buying a large suitcase, into which he stuffed the body. Then he got a taxi to take him back to his grandmother’s house in West Allis, where he had his own basement flat. There he dismembered it, and stuffed the parts into plastic bags which, like Dennis Nilsen, he put out for garbage collection.
As a result of the murder of Stephen Tuomi, Dahmer seems to have acknowledged that murder was, in fact, what he needed to satisfy his deviant sexual impulse. The fifteen murders that followed leave no possible doubt about it.
These took place between 16 January 1988 and 19 July 1991. The method was usually much the same: Dahmer picked up a male—usually black—and invited him back to his apartment. There the victim was offered a drugged drink, after which he was violated and killed—mostly by strangulation, although Dahmer later began using a knife. The body was dismembered; parts of it were stored for eating, and the rest left out for the garbageman.
In September 1988, Catherine Dahmer had finally decided she could no longer put up with the smells and her grandson’s drunkenness. On 25 September Dahmer moved into an apartment at 808 N. 24th Street.
There can be no doubt that Dahmer intended to use his new-found freedom to give full reign to his morbid sexual urges. But an unforeseen hitch occurred. Within twenty-four hours, the four-time murderer was in trouble with the police. On 26 September 1988, he met a 13-year-old Laotian boy named Sinthasomphone, lured him back to his apartment, and drugged him. But the elder brother of later victim Konerak somehow managed to escape, and Dahmer was charged with sexual assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes. He spent a week in prison, then was released on bail. On 30 January 1990, he was found guilty; the sentence would be handed out four months later.
But even the possibility of a long prison sentence could not cure Dahmer of his obsessive need to kill and dismember. When he appeared in court to be sentenced on 23 May 1989, he had already claimed his fifth victim. But Dahmer’s lawyer Gerald Boyle argued that the assault on the Laotian boy was a one-off offence, and would never happen again. Dahmer himself revealed considerable skill as an actor in representing himself as contrite and self-condemned. ‘I am an alcoholic and a homosexual with sexual problems.’ He described his appearance in court as a ‘nightmare come true’, declared that he was now a changed man, and ended by begging the judge: ‘Please don’t destroy my life.’ Judge William Gardner was touched by the appeal. This clean-cut boy obviously needed help, and there was no psychiatric help available in prison. So he sentenced Dahmer to five years on probation, and a year in a House of Correction, where he could continue to work at the chocolate factory during the day.
From the Community Correctional Center in Milwaukee, Dahmer addressed a letter to Judge Gardner, stating: ‘I have always believed a man should be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes he makes in life. The world has enough misery in it without my adding more to it. Sir, I assure you that it will never happen again. That is why, Judge Gardner, I am requesting a sentence modification.’
Dahmer was released from the Correctional Center two months early—on 2 March 1990. Eleven days later, he moved into the Oxford Apartments, and began the murder spree that ended with his arrest eighteen months later. In that time he killed twelve more young men.
Dahmer’s career of slaughter almost came to an abrupt end on 8 July 1990; it was on that day that he made the mistake of varying his method. He approached a 15-year-old Hispanic boy outside a gay bar, and offered him $200 to pose for nude photographs. The boy returned to room 213 and removed his clothes. But instead of offering him the usual drugged drink, Dahmer picked up a rubber mallet and hit him on the head. It failed to knock him unconscious, and the boy fought back as Dahmer tried to strangle him. Somehow, the boy succeeded in calming his attacker. And, incredibly, Dahmer allowed him to go, even calling a taxi.
The boy had promised not to notify the police. But when he was taken to hospital for treatment, he broke his promise. For a few moments, Dahmer’s future hung in the balance. But when the boy begged them not to allow his foster parents to find out that he was homosexual, the police decided to do nothing about it.
When he saw his probation officer, Donna Chester, the next day, Dahmer looked depressed and unshaven. He said he had money problems and was thinking of suicide. She wanted to know how he could have money problems when he was earning $1,500 a month, and his apartment cost less than $300 a month. He muttered something about hospital bills. And during the whole of the next month, Dahmer continued to complain of depression and stomach pains, and to talk about jumping off a high building. Donna Chester suggested that he ought to find himself another apartment in a less run-down area. She was unaware that Dahmer was an addict who now urgently needed a fix of his favourite drug: murder.
It happened a few weeks later, on 3 September 1990. In front of a bookstore on twenty-seventh, Dahmer picked up a young black dancer named Ernest Miller, who was home from Chicago, where he intended to start training at a dance school in the autumn. They had sex in Apartment 213, then Dahmer offered him a drugged drink, and watched him sink into oblivion. Perhaps because he had not killed for three months, Dahmer’s craving for violence and its nauseating aftermath was stronger than usual. Instead of strangling his victim, Dahmer cut his throat. He decided that he wanted to keep the skeleton, so after cutting the flesh from the bones, and dissolving most of it in acid, he bleached the skeleton with acid. He also kept the biceps, which he put in the freezer.
Neighbours were beginning to notice the smell off decaying flesh; some of them knocked on Dahmer’s door to ask about it. Dahmer would explain politely that his fridge was broken and that he was waiting to get it fixed.
On 25 March, there occurred an event that psychiatrists believe may be responsible for the final spate of multiple murder. It was on that day that Dahmer’s mother Joyce contacted him for the first time in five years. Joyce Dahmer—now Flint—was working as an AIDS counsellor in Fresno, California, and it may have been her contact with homosexuals that led her to telephone her son. She spoke openly about his homosexuality—for the first time—and told him she loved him. The call was a good idea—or would have been if she had made it a few years earlier.
But Dahmer was nearing the end of his tether, and even drink could not anaesthetize him for long. Neighbours kept complaining about the smell, and he solved this by buying a 57 gallon drum of concentrated hydrochloric acid, and disposing of some of the body parts that were causing the trouble. All this meant he was frequently late for work, or even absent. On 15 July 1991, the Ambrosia Chocolate Company finally grew tired of his erratic behaviour and fired him.
His reaction was typical. The same day he picked up a 24-year-old black named Oliver Lacy, took him back to his apartment, and gave him a drugged drink. After strangling him, he sodomized the body.
But the murder spree was almost over. Four days later, the head of the final victim joined the others in the freezer. He was 25-year-old Joseph Bradeholt, an out-of-work black who was hoping to move from Minnesota to Milwaukee with his wife and two children. But he accepted Dahmer’s offer of money for photographs, and willingly joined in oral sex in Room 213. After that, he was drugged, strangled and dismembered. His body was placed in the barrel of acid, which was swiftly turning into a black, sticky mess.
That Dahmer’s luck finally ran out may have been due to the carelessness that leads to the downfall of so many multiple murderers. The last intended victim, Tracy Edwards, was a slightly built man, and should have succumbed to the drug like all the others. For some reason, he failed to do so; it seems most likely that Dahmer failed to administer a large enough dose. Equally puzzling is the fact that, having seen that the drug had failed to work, he allowed Edwards to live, and spent two hours watching a video with him. Was the homicidal impulse finally burning itself out? Dahmer knew that if he failed to kill Tracy Edwards, he would be caught; yet, with a large knife in his hand, he allowed him to escape from the apartment.
It sounds as if he recognized that the time had come to try to throw off the burden of guilt and rejoin the human race.
On 27 January 1992, Wisconsin’s worst mass murderer came to trial in Milwaukee before Judge Lawrence Gram, entering a plea of guilty but insane. On 15 February, the jury rejected this plea and found Dahmer guilty of the fifteen murders with which he had been charged. He was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment.
On 14 April 1992, just two months after Dahmer was sentenced, another trial—this time in Russia—drew the attention of the world’s press. The accused was a 48-year-old grandfather named Andrei Chikatilo, and he was charged with the murders of fifty-three women and children.
On 24 December 1978, the mutilated body of 9-year-old Lena Zakotnova was found in the Grushevka River where it flows through the Soviet mining city of Shakhti. It had been tied in a sack and dumped in the water some forty-eight hours before its discovery. She had been sexually assaulted and partially throttled, and her lower torso had been ripped open by multiple knife wounds.
Lena was last seen after leaving school on the afternoon of her death. A woman named Burenkova reported seeing a girl of Lena’s description talking to a middle-aged man at a nearby tram stop, and they walked away together.
The Shakhti police soon arrested a suspect. Aleksandr Kravchenko had been in prison for a similar murder in the Crimea. He had been too young to be executed, so served six years of a ten-year sentence. He had been a prime suspect from the beginning of the investigation and when he was caught attempting a burglary the police decided to charge him with the murder.
Unconcerned at the fact that Kravchenko was only twenty-five, not ‘middle-aged,’ the Shakhti police soon extracted a confession. In the dock Kravchenko insisted that it had been beaten out of him, but this carried little weight with the judge (Soviet trials had no juries; a judge both decided guilt and passed sentence). Kravchenko was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in a labour camp.
There was a public outcry at the leniency of the sentence, and the prosecution, as allowed in Soviet law, appealed to increase it to death. A new judge agreed and Kravchenko was executed by a single shot in the back of the head in 1984. By that time the real killer of Lena Zakotnova had murdered at least sixteen other women and children.
Born in the Ukrainian farm village of Yablochnoye on 6 October, 1936, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was soon well acquainted with death. Stalin, in his drive to communize the peasantry, had reduced the Ukraine to a chaos of starvation and fear. In his first ten years, Chikatilo witnessed as much state-condoned brutality and killing as any soldier.
When he was 5 years old, Chikatilo’s mother told him about the disappearance of one of his cousins, seven years previously, and that she believed he been kidnapped and eaten. The gruesome story made a deep impression on Chikatilo. For years afterwards, he later admitted, he would brood on the story and recreate his cousin’s sufferings in his imagination. There can be no doubt that this strongly influenced his sexual development.
Chikatilo’s father was called up early in the Second World War and did not return until after the Nazi defeat. But his father’s return brought little comfort for the family. Roman Chikatilo had been captured by the Germans and the paranoid Stalin considered returning prisoners of war as virtual traitors to communism. Roman Chikatilo found that he had to tread carefully to avoid the suspicions of the secret police—very little stood between him and a firing squad.
Oddly enough, 10-year-old Andrei Chikatilo agreed with Joseph Stalin and was deeply ashamed of his father. He was a devout communist and his father’s survival was a constant source of humiliation. He found relief by escaping into the world of literature.
He was fascinated by a novel called Molodaya Gvardiya or The Young Guard which concerned the heroic exploits of a group of young Russian partisans fighting the Germans in the vast Soviet forests and eventually dying to a man, proclaiming loyalty to Stalin. A predictably bloody tale, it also contained several scenes in which prisoners were tortured for information. This positive, even heroic depiction of torture in isolated woodland made a deep impression on the child.
At school Chikatilo had few friends and was painfully shy. He was nick-named Baba—meaning woman—because he had chubby breasts and lived in terror that his chronic bed-wetting and short-sightedness would be discovered by his classmates. His weak sight was something of an obsession with him and it was not until he was 30 that he eventually obtained a pair of glasses, so keen was he to conceal the defect.
As he grew into his teens, his chubbiness turned to size and strength—his new nick name was ‘Andrei Sila’ meaning Andrew the Strong. Classmates remembered him as a voracious reader with a prodigious memory. At 16 he became editor of the school newspaper and was appointed as student agitator for political information; a post which required him to read out and explain the articles in Pravda and other Party news organs. Even so, his fervour was restricted to politics. He found it almost impossible to communicate socially, especially with the opposite sex.
At 18, he applied for a place in Moscow University to study Law. He was humiliated when he failed the entrance exams and blamed his father’s war record. This was typical of Chikatilo; all his life he would blame his failures on others.
Overcoming his shyness with women he attempted several relationships, but they all failed. His major problem was a conviction that he was impotent. Like a lot of teenage boys, he was so scared during his first attempts at sex that he failed to achieve an erection. As the years went on he became convinced that he was incapable of a normal sex life. Addicted to solitary masturbation, he despaired of ever having a happy sex life.
It was during his national service that he first experienced orgasm with a girl, and that was because she suddenly decided that things were going too far and tried to break his hold on her. She had no chance against his abnormal strength and he was surprised at the sexual passion her struggles aroused in him. He held her for only a few moments before releasing her unharmed, but had already ejaculated into his trousers. Thinking about it afterwards he realized that it was her fear and his power over her that had excited him so much. He had started to find sex and violence a stimulating concoction.
In the years following his national service he moved out of the Ukraine, east to Russia, where job prospects and the standard of living were better. He found work as a telephone engineer and a room in Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky, a small town just north of the large industrial city of Rostov. A short while afterwards his mother, father and sister came to live with him in this comparative luxury. His younger sister, Tatyana, was worried that he was not married at 27 and after several failed matchmaking attempts, introduced him to a 24-year-old girl called Fayina. Chikatilo was as shy as usual, but Fayina found this attractive. Things went well with the courtship and they were married in 1963.
He still thought of himself as impotent and made embarrassed excuses on their wedding night. A week later Fayina persuaded him to try again and, with some coaxing, the marriage was consummated. Even so, Chikatilo showed no enthusiasm for sex. His dammed sexual drives were by then pushing him in other, more unwholesome directions.
In 1971, he passed a correspondence degree course in Russian philology and literature from the Rostov university. With the new qualification, the 35-year-old Chikatilo embarked upon a fresh career as a teacher. He found that he lacked all aptitude for the work. His shyness encouraged the pupils either to ignore his presence or openly to mock him. Other members of staff disliked his odd manner and his tendency to self-pity, so he was virtually shunned by all. Yet he soon found himself enjoying the work as his sexual fantasies began to centre around children.
Over the next seven years Chikatilo committed numerous indecent assaults on his pupils. Apart from voyeurism, these included surreptitious gropings, excessive beatings and, on one occasion, mouthing the genitals of a sleeping boy in a school dormitory. His sexual drive to dominate and control had centred on children as the easiest target and, as time went on, he developed a taste for fantasizing about sadism.
The oddest part of the situation was the inaction of the authorities. Chikatilo was forced to resign from several teaching jobs for his behaviour, but his record remained spotless each time. In the Soviet teaching system the failure of one teacher reflected on his colleagues and superiors as well, so they simply passed him on and pretended that nothing had happened.
In 1978, the Chikatilos and their two children moved to the town of Shakhti. Fayina had heard the rumours of his sexual misdemeanours, but had chosen to ignore them. He behaved quite normally towards their own son and daughter, aged 9 and 11, and she was unable to believe that a man who could barely produce one erection a month could marshal the sexual energy to be a pervert.
Chikatilo now bought an old shack in the slum end of town and began to invite down-and-out young women back with offers of food and vodka. There he would request them to perform sexual acts—notably fellatio—that he would never have requested from his strait-laced wife. He would often be unable to achieve erection, but this seemed to matter less with the kind of derelicts who accepted his invitation. Yet his real interest remained pre-pubescent children, and on 22 December 1978, he persuaded one to follow him to his shack.
Lena Zakotnova had caught his eye as soon as he saw her waiting at the tram stop. He had sidled up to her and started chatting. She soon revealed to the grandfatherly stranger that she desperately needed to go to the toilet and he persuaded her to follow him to his shack.
Once through the door he dropped his kindly facade and started to tear at her clothes. Muffling her screams by choking her with his forearm he blindfolded her with her scarf and tried to rape her. Once again he failed to achieve an erection, but ejaculated anyway. In an ecstasy he pushed his semen into her with his fingers and ruptured her hymen. The sight of the blood caused him to orgasm again and filled him with sexual excitement. Pulling out a pocket knife he stabbed at her repeatedly, tearing open her whole lower torso. When he returned to his senses he felt terrified—he knew he would face the death sentence if caught. Wrapping the corpse in a few sacks he crept outside, crossed the street and a stretch of wasteland and dropped Lena in the fast flowing Grushevka River. The autopsy later showed that she was still alive when she hit the water.
After watching the bundle float away, Chikatilo went home. But in his agitation he forgot to turn off the light in the shack. His neighbours on the slum street had not seen the pair arrive or heard Lena’s muffled screams. However, one of them did note that Chikatilo’s light had been left on all night and mentioned it to a policeman asking questions from door to door. Chikatilo was called in for questioning.
The police soon guessed that the sullen teacher was using the shack for assignations, but this was not incriminating in itself. What interested them was the fact that some very young girls had been seen entering and leaving with Chikatilo, and a few enquiries at his old schools had revealed his taste for paedophilia.
He was called in for questioning nine times in all. Then the police transferred their attention to Kravchenko. They did not even examine the shack for traces of blood.
Chikatilo continued teaching until 1981, when staff cuts made him redundant. On 3 September 1981, six months after losing his job, he killed again.
He was now working as a supply clerk for a local industrial conglomerate. This involved travelling around, often to the other side of the country, to obtain the necessary parts and supplies to run the Shakhti factory.
It would undoubtedly have been better if Chikatilo had remained a schoolteacher. In a restricted environment his opportunities would have been confined. The new job allowed him to travel, and spend as much time as he liked doing it. Now he was free to hunt as he willed.
He met Larisa Tkachenko at a bus stop outside the Rostov public library. She was a 17-year-old absentee from boarding school who was used to exchanging the odd fling for a nice meal and a drink or two. Her usual dates were young soldiers, but when the middle-aged man asked if she wanted to go to a local recreation area she agreed without much hesitation.
After a short walk they found themselves on a gravel path leading through a deserted stretch of woodland. Away from possible onlookers Chikatilo could not keep his hands off her any longer. He threw her down and started to tear at her trousers. Although she almost certainly expected to have sex with him, this was too frightening for her and she started to fight back. His already overstretched self-control snapped and he bludgeoned her with his heavy fists in an ecstasy of sado-sexual release. To stifle her cries he rammed earth into her mouth then choked her to death. He bit off one of her nipples as he ejaculated over the corpse.
This time he did not come back to earth with a jolt as he had after killing Lena Zakotnova. He ran around the corpse waving her clothes and howling with joy. He later said ‘I felt like a partisan’, a reference to his childhood favourite The Young Guard. After half an hour he calmed down, covered Larisa’s corpse with some branches and hid her clothes. She was found the next day, but no clues to the identity of the killer were discovered.
The murder of Lena Zakotnova had made Chikatilo aware of the basic nature of his desires; the murder of Larisa Tkachenko made him aware that he was destined to go on killing.
All serial killers seem to cross this mental Rubicon. The initial horror and guilt gives way to an addiction to hunting that transcends all social and moral boundaries. They never seem to break the habit; once hooked, they continue until they are caught or die.
Ten months later, on 12 June 1982, Chikatilo killed again. Thirteen-year-old Lyuba Biryuk left her home in the little settlement of Zaplavskaya to get some shopping from the nearby village of Donskoi Posyulok. She was last seen alive waiting at a local bus stop, but apparently decided to walk home in the warm sunshine. Chikatilo fell in step with her and started a conversation. Children always found his manner reassuring, but as soon as they came to a secluded stretch of path he attacked and tried to rape her. Failing as usual, he pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed wildly at her until her struggles and screams ceased. He covered her body, hid her clothes and shopping in the undergrowth and escaped unobserved. She was found two weeks later. In the heat of the southern Russian summer she had decayed to no more than a skeleton.
Chikatilo killed six more times that year: once in July, twice in August, twice in September and once in December. Four of these were girls ranging in age from 10 to 19 but the other two were boys, aged 15 and 9. This bisexual choice of victims would confuse the police investigation later on. Indeed, in the early stages of linking the murders some of the boys were officially classified as girls (despite their male names) because officers could not believe the killer could be attracted to both sexes.
In fact, as any criminal psychologist could have told them, the sex of the victims was almost immaterial. Chikatilo wanted to be in total control of his victims. Boys served his purpose as well as girls. His need to revenge himself on a world he hated and resented pushed him further from the norm, and killing boys was a way of being even more wicked.
Most of these victims were killed in the Rostov region, but two he killed on his business trips to other republics. Even when the majority of his victims had been linked into one investigation, these, and others killed outside the Rostov district, were not connected until Chikatilo himself confessed to them. A police force with more experience of serial crime would have quickly noted a linking pattern in the murders. All the victims were children or teenagers who had somehow been lured to secluded, usually wooded areas. They had been savagely attacked, sexually assaulted and usually butchered with a long bladed knife. Most strikingly, in almost every case, wounds were found around the eyes of the victim.
After killing a 10-year-old girl called Olya Stalmachenok on 11 December 1982, Chikatilo lay low once again. His next murder did not take place until mid-June 1983: a 15-year-old Armenian girl called Laura Sarkisyan. Her body was never found and the murder only came to light when Chikatilo confessed years later.
The next month he met a 13-year-old girl in the Rostov train station. He recognized her as Ira Dunenkova, the little sister of one of his casual girlfriends from teaching days. It was obviously a risk to approach somebody who could—even tenuously—be linked to himself, but from her ragged clothes he quickly realized that she had become one of the innumerable vagrants than haunted every Soviet city, despite their official non-existence. Taking a chance that she might not be missed for some time, if ever, he persuaded her to go for a walk with him in the nearby stretch of heath called Aviators’ Park. Reaching a quiet spot he tried to have sex with her and, failing to get an erection, he used a more reliable instrument; a kitchen knife.
Chikatilo killed three more times that summer. On uncertain dates he killed Lyuda Kutsyuba, aged 24 and a woman aged between 18 and 25 whose identity has not been discovered. On 8 August he persuaded 7-year-old Igor Gudkov to follow him to Aviators’ Park and then butchered him.
This brought his number of victims to fourteen, of which about half had been discovered by the police. Even for an area with a high—if unofficial—crime rate like Rostov, over half-a-dozen murdered children was enough to catch the attention of the central police authority in Moscow. A team of investigators was sent to assess the situation in September 1983. Their report was highly critical of the inept handling of the murders by the local police and concluded that six victims were definitely the work of one sexual deviant. The report was accepted and its suggestions quickly implemented, but, as was typical of the Soviet system, the public were not warned of the danger.
Shielded by public ignorance, Chikatilo killed three more people before the turn of the year: a 22-year-old woman called Valya Chuchulina and Vera Shevkun, a prostitute aged 19; and finally, on 27 December, a 14-year-old boy called Sergei Markov, his seventeenth victim.
Nineteen-eighty-four was to prove the most terrible year in Chikatilo’s murderous career. Between January and September he murdered fifteen women and children.
Shortly after the New Year, he was accused of stealing two rolls of linoleum from his factory and was sacked, but he soon found another supply clerk job in the middle of the teeming city of Rostov.
Chikatilo’s method of hunting victims was time-consuming and, fortunately, rarely successful. He would hang around train stations, bus stops, airports and other public places, and would approach potential victims and strike up an innocuous conversation.
If they warmed to him he would offer them the bait. To children he would propose going to his home to watch videos (then and now a rare luxury in Russia). He might also make the same suggestion to young adults, or he might offer to take them, via a little known short-cut, to some place they wanted to go. To vagrants or prostitutes he would simply offer vodka, food or money for sex in the woods.
Living near Rostov it had proved difficult to spend so much time hunting. Now, as he travelled, it was suddenly easier.
On 9 January, he killed 17-year-old Natalya Shalapinina in Aviators’ Park. Then on 21 February he killed a 44-year-old tramp called Marta Ryabyenko in almost exactly the same spot. On 24 March Chikatilo killed a 10-year-old girl, Dima Ptashnikov, just outside the town of Novoshakhtinsk. Nearby, police found a footprint in a patch of mud which they were convinced belonged to the murderer. It was little enough, but it was their first solid piece of forensic evidence, and it improved the flagging morale of the investigators.
In May 1984, Chikatilo took his greatest risk ever. Haunting the Rostov train station he bumped into an ex-girlfriend, Tanya Petrosyan, a 32-year-old divorcee whom he had not seen for six years. He invited her for a picnic, but she replied that she had no time then. Common sense dictated that he should have left it at that. If he made a date for a later time she might tell other people about it. Even so, he took her address.
A few days later he arrived at Tanya’s house carrying a new doll for her 11-year-old daughter. He was also carrying a knife and a hammer. He later insisted that he had only wanted sex from Tanya, but he now carried his killing tools as a matter of habit. He found himself being introduced to Tanya’s elderly mother, and was told that Sveta, the daughter, would have to go with them on the picnic.
They took a train to a nearby stretch of woodland. As Sveta played with her doll a little way off, Chikatilo and Tanya undressed and started to have oral sex. After a while Chikatilo tried to enter Tanya, but failed. It was then that she made the greatest mistake of her life; she jeered at his inability. Seeing red, he grabbed the knife from his pocket and drove it into the side of her head. Then he beat her to a pulp with the hammer.
Hearing her mother’s dying screams, Sveta tried to run away, but Chikatilo soon caught her. He knocked her down and then killed her with dozens of blows from the knife and hammer. The attack was so furious that he completely beheaded the little girl. Afterwards he dressed himself and caught the train home.
Tanya’s mother was old and mentally subnormal. She waited for three days before contacting the police, and even then could not remember what the stranger had looked like. Once again, his luck had held.
He had now killed twenty-two, and over the next four months this rose to thirty-two. Most were in the Rostov area, but three he killed on business trips; two in Tashkent and one in Moscow. As usual his targets were of both sexes, aged between 11 and 24. He would have doubtless killed more that year, but at last his luck seemed to run out. He was arrested on suspicion of being the Rostov serial killer on 14 September 1984.
Inspector Aleksandr Zanasovski had questioned Chikatilo for acting suspiciously at the Rostov train station two weeks previously. On the evening of 13 September he spotted him again, this time across the square at the Rostov bus station. Again he noted that Chikatilo was trying to strike up conversations with young people with almost manic persistence.
Zanasovski followed Chikatilo until four the next morning. In that time they travelled backwards and forwards on various forms of public transport with no destination ever becoming apparent. Eventually, when Chikatilo appeared to receive oral sex from a young lady on a public bench, the Inspector arrested him. In the briefcase that the suspect had carried all night the police found a jar of vaseline, a length of rope and a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade.
Yet still Chikatilo’s incredible luck held. When the forensic department tested his blood, the case fell apart.
The semen found on and around the victims proved to belong to a ‘secreter’; that is, a man who secretes minute amounts of blood into his spittle and semen. The tests had shown the killer to have ‘AB’ blood—Chikatilo was type ‘A’.
Despite this major setback, the investigators found it hard to believe that he was innocent. Under Soviet law they could only hold a suspect for a maximum of ten days without preferring charges, but they needed more time to build a case against him. They checked his previous record, learned about the theft of the two rolls of linoleum and booked him on that.
On 12 December 1984, Chikatilo was found guilty by the people’s Court of the crime of Theft of State Property, and sentenced to a year of correctional labour. However, since he had already spent three months in jail, the judge waived the sentence.
On 1 August 1985, Chikatilo went back to killing. The victim was 18-year-old Natalya Pokhlistova, a mentally subnormal transient he met during a business trip to Moscow. They went off to a deserted spot and tried to have sex. When he failed he mutilated her with a knife then strangled her.
Chikatilo killed again that month. On 27 August 1986, he murdered Irina Gulyayeva. Like his last victim, she was an 18-year-old, mentally subnormal vagrant. He met her in Shakhti—the place where he killed for the very first time—and butchered her in the nearby woods. She was his thirty-fourth victim, and the last for a year and nine months.
On 16 May 1987, Chikatilo killed a 13-year-old boy called Oleg Makarenkov in Siberia.
He killed twice more in 1987, both in areas far from Rostov. The thirty-sixth victim was a 12-year-old boy called Ivan Bilovetski, killed in Chikatilo’s native Ukraine on 29 July. The thirty-seventh was Yura Tereshonok, aged 16, outside Leningrad on 15 September.
Once again, he ceased killing for the winter months, perhaps because it was harder to get people to accompany him into snowbound woods. Some time in April 1988, he killed an unidentified woman in the Krasny region. Then, on 14 May, he butchered 9-year-old Lyosha Voronko near the Ilovaisk train station in the Ukraine. His last victim that year, bringing the sum total to forty was 15-year-old Zhenya Muratov, on 14 July.
The following year, on 1 March 1989, he killed indoors for the second time. Tatyana Ryzhova, a 15-year-old runaway, was induced to follow Chikatilo to an apartment that belonged to his daughter, Ludmila. The place had been empty since Ludmila had divorced her husband and moved in with her parents. Chikatilo had the job of swapping it for two smaller apartments (‘swapping’ was the typical method of property dealing in the Soviet Union). It was a task he was in no hurry to complete since it provided the perfect place to bring prostitutes.
He gave the girl food and vodka, and tried to have sex with her. Soon she became restless and started to shout. Chikatilo tried to quiet her, but when she started to scream, he silenced her by stabbing her in the mouth. Some of the neighbours heard Tatyana’s screams, but did nothing; wife-beating is a common occurrence in Russia.
When Chikatilo had ceased to mutilate Tatyana he realized his danger. Somehow he had to get her body out of the apartment without being seen. He was in a populated area and for all he knew the police might already be on their way.
He solved the problem by cutting off her head and legs and wrapping them in her clothes. Then he mopped the bloody floor and went out to steal a sled to remove the body. Finding one nearby, he set off into the night with Tatyana’s remains firmly tied down.
All seemed to be going well until he tried to pull the sled over a rail-crossing and it stuck due to the thin snow cover. To his horror he saw a stranger walking towards him and wondered if he should either run or try to kill the witness. The man pulled level with him and, without a word, helped Chikatilo lift the burdened sled across the tracks, then went on his way. Tatyana’s mutilated body was found stuffed into some nearby pipes on 9 March.
Chikatilo killed four more times that year. On 11 May he murdered 8-year-old Sasha Dyakonov in Rostov. Travelling to the Vladimir region to the north-east he killed 10-year-old Lyosha Moiseyev on 11 May. In mid-August he killed Yelena Varga, aged 19, on another business trip, this time to the Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky region. Finally, he murdered Alyosha Khobotov on 28 August.
He met 10-year-old Khobotov outside a video salon (a modern-day Russian equivalent of a movie house) in the town of Shakhti. The boy happily told him that he preferred horror movies above all others. Chikatilo replied that he owned a video machine and a large collection of horror videos. Alyosha jumped at his offer to view them.
Chikatilo led his victim through the local graveyard to a quiet spot where a shovel stood by an open grave. He had dug the trench himself some time earlier in a fit of suicidal depression. Now, in a different mood, he bit out Alyosha’s tongue, cut off his genitals and threw him into the pit. Then he filled in the grave.
On 14 January 1990, he murdered 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko. As with the last victim, he picked up Andrei outside the Shakhti video salon by offering to show him horror movies. The following 7 March, he persuaded a 10-year-old boy called Yaroslav Makarovto to follow him to a party. He led him into the Rostov Botanical Gardens, then molested and butchered him. His next victim was Lyubov Zuyeva, a 31-year-old mentally handicapped woman whom he met on a train to Shakhti sometime in April. He persuaded her to have sex with him in the woods, then stabbed her.
On 28th July, he persuaded 13-year-old Vitya Petrov, waiting for a late train with his family at Rostov Station, to follow him to the Botanical Gardens. Once out of the sight of others, he stabbed the boy to death. Strangely enough, Chikatilo had tried to pick up Vitya’s younger brother, Sasha, only a few hours earlier, but had been scolded away by the boys’ mother. Chikatilo’s fiftieth victim was 11-year-old Ivan Fomin, killed on a river beach in Novocherkassk on 14 August. The corpse was found three days later.
Chikatilo temporarily now decided to make a journey to Moscow. For some months he had been involved in a petty dispute with some Assyrian builders over garages that had been built next to his son’s house, blocking the light. Since his son was away doing his national service, Chikatilo had made strenuous complaints via official channels, but nothing had happened.
Growing increasingly paranoid, Chikatilo decided that some sort of illegal conspiracy was being directed against him, and in Moscow demanded audiences with both President Gorbachev and parliamentary head Anatoly Lukyanov. Needless to say he was granted neither, but stayed on for a few days in the ‘tent city’ of protesters that had steadily grown outside the Kremlin since the introduction of glasnost. After that he had to return to work, so he packed up his tent and protest sign and went back to Rostov.
On 17 October 1990, he met a mentally handicapped 16-year-old called Vadim Gromov on the Novocherkassk train. He persuaded the young man to get off the train with him at the wooded station of Donleskhoz by offering to take him to a party. Gromov’s body was found just over two weeks later, by which time Chikatilo had murdered again. This time the victim was 16-year-old Vitya Tishchenko, who disappeared after buying train tickets from the Shakhti station on the last day of October. He was found, mutilated, three days later.
Oddly enough, the investigators were beginning to feel more optimistic. For most of the inquiry, morale had been abysmal. They had always been undermanned and badly organized, and it had been easy for Chikatilo to play games with them. He would kill in Rostov, and when the police concentrated their manpower in that area, he would kill in Shakhti or Novocherkassk, throwing them into confusion.
Now, the killer was becoming careless. The woman in the Shakhti ticket office reported seeing a tall middle-aged man in dark glasses hanging around when Tishchenko bought the tickets. Her teenage daughter added that she had seen the same man trying to pick up a boy several days before. With this rough description and increased manpower, the investigation at last seemed to have a chance. If only the killer would return to one of his known murder locations they might get him before he murdered again.
This was exactly what Chikatilo did, but, once again, the police missed him. His fifty-third victim was a 22-year-old girl called Sveta Korostik, whom he killed in the woods outside Donleskhoz train station. Trying to double-guess the killer, only one policeman was posted there to check the identities of any suspicious persons alighting on the platform.
Sveta’s body was found a week later. But when Sergeant Igor Rybakov, the officer on duty at the station on the day of Sveta’s murder, was questioned, an amazing fact emerged. He had interviewed a suspicious-looking man that day and had sent a report in, but, for some reason, it had not been processed.
Rybakov reported that at 4 p.m. on 6 October, he had observed a large, mud-spattered, middle-aged man emerge from the forest and wash his hands in the dribble of water flowing from the platform fire hydrant. The sergeant would probably have ignored him, taking him for one of the many mushroom pickers that frequented the station, but noticed that he was wearing a grey suit, an odd attire for rain-soaked woods. He asked for identification, and was handed a passport that bore the name Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. The man explained that he had been visiting a friend. The officer studied Chikatilo and noticed that his hand was bandaged and there was a streak of red liquid on his cheek. Nevertheless, he allowed him to board a train and leave.
Chikatilo’s name was checked and the investigators learned of the Lena Zakotnova questioning, the paedophilia and the 1984 arrest. But for the fact that his blood group was wrong he would have been a prime suspect. It was at this point that somebody remembered a circular that had been sent around to all Soviet police departments. Japanese scientists had found that in one case in a million, the blood type secreted into the semen and the actual blood type can be different. It was just possible that Chikatilo might be such a person.
Chikatilo was placed under 24-hour surveillance, but the fear that he might commit another murder or commit suicide led the investigators to arrest him on 20 November 1990. He offered no resistance and came quietly. His semen type was tested and proved to be ‘AB’; the same as that found on the bodies of the victims.
Now certain they had the right man, the police wanted a confession. After days of relentless questioning, Chikatilo slowly began to admit the truth. He started by confessing to molesting children while he had been a schoolteacher, but eventually described fifty-five sex murders, including that of Lena Zakotnova. The stunned police, who had only linked thirty-six victims to the Rostov murderer, had now to recognize that they had executed an innocent man.
Chikatilo was finally charged with the brutal murder of fifty-three women and children. Shortly before he confessed he said to the interviewing officer, ‘Everything I have done makes me tremble…I feel only gratitude to the investigating bodies that they captured me.’
Over the next year and a half, Chikatilo was studied by doctors and criminologists. During that time he led officers to undiscovered bodies and, with a shop dummy and a stage knife, acted out how he had killed each victim.
His habits had become fixed over the years. For example, he would usually bite off the victim’s tongue and nipples. Wounds on or around the eyes were almost invariable. He would cut or bite off the boys’ penises and scrotums and throw them away like so much rubbish. With the girls and women he would cut out the uterus and chew it manically as he stabbed at them. The psychiatrists ruled that this was not technically cannibalism, since he did not swallow human material, but was in fact motivated by the same impulse that makes people give love bites in the height of sexual passion. Chikatilo simply commented, ‘I did not want to bite them so much as chew them. They were so beautiful and elastic.’
Chikatilo’s wife was stunned when she was told of the reason for his arrest. She had thought he was being persecuted for protesting about the Assyrian garages and, at first, refused to believe that the man she had been married to for twenty-five years was a monster. He had always been a loving, if weak-willed father to their children and doted on their grandchildren. How could he have concealed over a decade of slaughter from her? Yet, when Chikatilo himself admitted the crimes to her face she was forced to accept the terrible truth. She cursed him and left, never to contact him again. For their part, the police believed that she had known nothing of her husband’s activities and provided her with a change of identity and a home in another part of the country.
The trial opened on 14 April 1992. The shaven-headed Chikatilo raved and shouted from the cage that held and protected him from the angry public. At one point he even stripped off his clothes and waved his penis at the court shouting, ‘Look at this useless thing! What do you think I could do with that?’ His extreme behaviour might well have been motivated by the fact that his only hope of escaping execution was a successful insanity plea.
The defence tried to prove that Chikatilo was driven by an insane and undeniable need to kill and was not in control of his actions during the murders. They had little chance of convincing the judge, since Chikatilo clearly planned many of the killings, and had long dormant periods.
An attempt was made on Chikatilo’s life during the trial. One day, as the court was being cleared, a young man whose 17-year-old sister had been killed by the defendant took a heavy metal ball from his pocket and hurled it through the bars of the cage. It just missed Chikatilo, smashing into the wall behind his head. The guard commander, seeing that the judge had not witnessed the incident, let the would-be assassin go.
On 14 October 1992, as Chikatilo received individual sentences for fifty-two murders, the court was filled with shrieks that often drowned the judge’s voice. But at one point, Judge Akubzhanov showed unexpected agreement with one of Chikatilo’s arguments, when he accepted that it was the refusal of the Soviet Union to acknowledge the level of crime that had contributed to Chikatilo’s long immunity.
Sixteen months later, on 14 February 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was executed by a single shot in the back of the neck, fired from a small calibre Makarov pistol.
By comparison with Chikatilo’s highly publicized homicides and confessions, the case of Arthur Shawcross, the ‘Genesee River killer’, received very little publicity. The reason may lie in his appearance; unlike Chikatilo—whose staring eyes made him look like a monster—Shawcross was a commonplace little man with a large paunch and balding head who looked much older than his forty-four years. Yet, with his penchant for sadism and necrophilia, he was at least as dangerous as either Chikatilo or Dahmer.
The Genesee River flows through the small city of Rochester, in New York State. But it was 15 miles outside Rochester, at a bridge over Salmon Creek, that the body of the first victim, ‘Dotsie’ Blackburn, a known prostitute, was found on 24 March 1988. She had been strangled, and the killer had bitten a piece out of her genitals. The last time she had been seen alive was a month earlier, in the Rochester red-light district on Lake Avenue.
The second victim, Anna Steffen, vanished in late May. When her body was found, at the edge of the river, it was badly decomposed, but water in the lungs indicated that she had died of drowning.
It was more than a year later, in June 1989, that Dorothy Kneller, a homeless waitress in her late fifties, disappeared. When her body was found it was little more than a skeleton, and the skull was missing. Between then and the end of the year, seven more women vanished from the Rochester area. Only one of these, a retarded girl called June Stotts, was not a prostitute. Her body had been cut open and eviscerated, and her sexual organs were missing.
The murder caused a panic in the red-light district, and prostitutes began to study potential customers with more care than ever before. Yet the killing continued. Agent Gregg McCrary, of the FBI team at Quantico, correctly deduced that the killer looked so ordinary and harmless that he was almost invisible. When the local police told him they had arrested a transvestite who was driving a car, he told them: ‘No, that’s not the man you’re looking for.’ The killer, it seemed clear, was a driver, but the car would also be nondescript. Since most of the victims were in their late twenties, McCrary deduced that the killer was probably slightly older, in his early thirties. He would probably work in a menial job, and might well be a sportsman—this was deduced from the fact that so many victims had been found in or near the river, which the killer probably knew as a fisherman, and that June Stotts had been eviscerated as a hunter eviscerates game.
Most important, McCrary also suggested that the killer might be the kind of person who liked to return to the body, possibly even to have sex with it. This is why, in January 1990, a police helicopter began to fly over the Genesee River, looking for more victims from the air. At Salmon Creek Bridge—where the first victim’s body had been found—they spotted a body, almost under the bridge, encased in ice. And on the bridge just above it there was a parked car—a Chevrolet—and a man sitting with his legs out of the passenger door, where he could see the body, apparently masturbating. As the helicopter swooped down, the car drove away down Route 31—towards the town of Spencerport. The helicopter followed, and saw the car turn into a municipal parking lot. A heavily built man got out and walked across to the Wedgewood Nursing Home on the other side of the street. The police radioed a police patrol car to go and park behind the Chevrolet.
The driver of the patrol car had no difficulty finding the person who had just entered the home. The grey-haired, paunchy man, who seemed completely unperturbed, offered his identity papers, which gave his name as Arthur J. Shawcross, with an address in nearby Rochester. He explained that his girlfriend Clara Neal—the owner of the car—worked in the home as a cook. He seemed to think he was being questioned because—according to his own account—he had been urinating into a bottle on the Salmon Creek Bridge.
Inspector Dennis Blythe found the prisoner co-operative. Shawcross raised no objections when Blythe had him photographed. But when the photograph was taken to a prostitute who had reported a curious encounter with a ‘john’ who could only obtain an erection when she ‘played dead’, she immediately picked out Shawcross from a group of other photographs.
A check on police records showed that Shawcross had been arrested for burglary as a teenager, later for arson, and had spent fifteen years in jail for child murder. He had killed—and mutilated—an 11-year-old boy, Jackie Blake, and raped and suffocated an 8-year-old girl, Karen Ann Hill. He had been tried only on the second count, and in 1972 sentenced to twenty-five years. He had been paroled after fifteen, and lived for a while in Binghamton, NY. But when neighbours there had learned of his conviction for child murder, they had virtually ‘run him out of town’.
Shawcross was married to a girl named Rose Walley, but he also had a mistress, Clara Neal, whose hired car he was driving.
For the next two days, Shawcross showed himself highly co-operative with the police, but denied knowing anything about the murders. When shown a photograph of the ninth victim, Elizabeth Gibson, and told that he had been seen with her before her disappearance, he was silent. Finally Blythe asked quietly: ‘I hope Clara wasn’t involved in this?’ Shawcross hung his head. ‘No, I was the only one involved.’
Shawcross then talked in detail about the murders. He was also to talk about them to psychiatrist—and expert on serial murder—Joel Norris. But although Norris quotes these accounts without comment—in The Genesee River Killer—it is very obvious that Shawcross is constantly lying. He explained that he had killed Dotsie Blackburn after she began to give him a ‘blow job’, and bit his penis until the blood came.
Anna Steffen, the second victim, had been frolicking with Shawcross in the river when he gave her a playful shove and she fell on her side. She began screaming, saying she was pregnant and that she was going to call the police. He held her head under the water until she drowned.
The third victim, Dorothy Keller, was a friend of Shawcross and his wife. They had been spending the morning on an island in the river when—he explained—she threatened to tell his wife Rose that they were lovers. He had hit her with a piece of wood and broken her neck.
Patty Ives, the fourth victim, was removing his wallet from his back pocket when he caught her. They quarrelled, and he strangled her while having anal intercourse.
The fifth victim, Frances Brown, died accidentally, according to Shawcross. He was ‘deep throating her’ while he performed cunnilingus, and his penis choked her to death.
June Stotts, the retarded girl, was also a friend of Shawcross and his wife. They went together to a spot beside the river, and she took off her pants and his trousers—after explaining that she was a virgin. After having sex, she began screaming: ‘I’m going to tell,’ until he silenced her by strangling her. Then he had more sex with the body, and ‘cut her wide open in a straight line…from her neck to her asshole. Cut out her pussy and ate it. I was one sick person…’
Maria Welsh, the seventh victim, also tried to steal his wallet while they were having sex. ‘I asked for my money back. She told me to go fuck myself.’ So he strangled her.
Darlene Trippi, the eighth victim, declined to return his thirty dollars when he was unable to get an erection, and laughed unsympathetically, so he strangled her.
Elizabeth Gibson also tried to steal his wallet, then scratched his face with her fingernails.
June Cicero, victim number ten, made fun of him when he failed to get an erection, called him a faggot, and threatened to tell the cops (Shawcross did not specify what about). He strangled her, and three days later, returned to the body and cut out the vagina, which he ‘ate’.
The eleventh victim was a black prostitute named Felicia Stephens. She put her head in the rear window of his car, and he closed it on her throat, suffocating her. This, he explained, was because black inmates had raped him in jail, and the murder was an act of self-preservation.
Jackie Blake, the first child victim, had also—according to Shawcross—provoked his own murder. The boy, he said, was following him, and when he told him to go home, started cursing and said he would go wherever he wanted to. So Shawcross, in a rage, hit him with his fist. Later, he agreed, he had returned to the corpse and cut off the genitals, which he ate. Medical examination suggested that the boy had been forced to undress and to run some distance before he had been sexually assaulted and killed.
In the case of the 8-year-old Karen Hill, Shawcross explained that he was ‘mad at her for going down to the river alone’. He raped her, then, when she began to cry, suffocated her by stuffing grass and leaves into her mouth and up her nose.
What becomes very clear from Norris’s book is that Shawcross lacked Chikatilo’s honesty in describing his crimes and their motivation. This motivation—which was entirely sexual—sprang out of his low self-esteem. He had a highly dominant mother and a weak father, who allowed her to browbeat him; therefore he lacked a masculine ‘role model’—in that sense, Shawcross’s situation resembled that of Henry Lee Lucas.
Also—like Lucas—Shawcross suffered a number of head injuries as a child and young adult. Struck on the head with a stone in a local gang fight, he was knocked unconscious and needed several stitches. After that, he began to experience paralysis below the waist. At school he was knocked out on the sports field by a discus, which caused amnesia about the whole incident. As a member of a construction crew he was accidentally struck on the head with a sledgehammer, and was again unconscious for hours. And during infantry training in the army he fell off a ladder and landed on the back of his head, winch resulted in concussion.
Dr Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist who examined Shawcross, also carried out a study of fourteen juveniles sentenced to death in America, and found that all fourteen had suffered severe head injuries during childhood; Once again—as in so many other cases—we note how often serial killers have suffered brain abnormalities due to head injuries.
Like so many other serial killers, Shawcross was also driven by powerful sexual urges from an early age—he claims he was introduced to oral sex before he was 9 by an aunt who was staying with them, and that he also practised oral sex on his sister, four years his junior. When his mother caught him masturbating—which was more than once—she threatened to cut off his penis with a butcher’s knife. At fourteen, when he was leading a fairly active (oral) sex life with his sister, a cousin and a girl at school, he was offered a lift by a man who then raped him, suddenly introducing disturbing traumas into a sex life that had been relatively uninhibited.
According to Shawcross, it was Vietnam that turned him into a serial killer. There, in the jungle, he murdered two Vietnamese girls, raping and disembowelling one and roasting and partly eating the other’s severed leg. On another occasion he opened fire on a group of Vietnamese who were sitting around a camp fire, killing (he estimates) twenty-six.
Once back in America, there were more humiliations from his overbearing mother, complex marital problems—and finally, the sex murders of Jackie Blake and Karen Hill. It is clear that Shawcross chose children because his ability to control them brought a sense of power accompanied by sexual potency. And later, when he began murdering prostitutes, he killed them before having sex with the bodies. He also returned to many of them to have sex later. He was considering having sex with the corpse of June Cicero—even though he had cut out her genitals—when the police helicopter saw him on the bridge.
Shawcross’s defence was of insanity, but the jury were unconvinced; after a five-week trial they took only a few hours to find him guilty, and he was sentenced to a total of two hundred and fifty years in prison.
Looking back on the case, and on his ‘profile’ of Shawcross, Gregg McCrary was intrigued to realize that he had been wrong about only one detail. He had estimated Shawcross’s age at around 30, when in fact he was in his mid-forties. Then the explanation dawned on him: Shawcross had spent fifteen years in prison. It was exactly as if his life was ‘on pause’ for that period.
With Dahmer and Shawcross behind bars, America quickly registered another ‘first’ in serial murder: the first female serial killer. This, of course, has to be immediately qualified by admitting that Anna Zwanziger and Gesina Gottfried were serial poisoners, and that Belle Gunness has a strong claim to be America’s first female serial killer. But these three women all had specific motives for getting rid of individual victims: usually profit, sometimes revenge, occasionally a mere passing grudge. If by serial killer we mean someone who experiences a psychopathic need to kill, devoid of apparent motive, then Aileen Wuornos certainly qualifies as America’s first female serial killer.
Twelve days before Christmas, 1989, two friends, scrap-metal hunting in the woods outside Ormond Beach, Florida, found a male corpse wrapped in an old carpet. The body had been there for about two weeks and was badly decomposed due to Florida’s almost perpetually hot weather. However, the forensics lab managed to identify the victim as Richard Mallory, 51-year-old electrician from the town of Clearwater. The autopsy showed that he had been shot three times in the chest and once in the neck with a .22 calibre handgun.
Because of the proximity of Daytona Beach—a notorious crime black spot—and the overall lack of evidence, the investigating officers made only routine efforts to find the perpetrator. In all likelihood Mallory had been shot in a fight or a mugging, then hidden in the woods to avoid detection. Such crimes took place all the time around Daytona, and the chances of catching the killer were minimal.
The police were soon forced to reappraise the situation. Over the next twelve months, five more victims were discovered in almost identical circumstances. A 43-year-old construction worker, David Spears, was found on 1 June 1990, shot six times with a .22 handgun. Five days later the corpse of rodeo worker Charles Carskaddon, aged 40, was found covered with an electric blanket with nine bullet holes in him. A 50-year-old truck driver called Troy Burress was found on 4 August, killed by two .22 calibre bullets. On 12 September, a 56-year-old child abuse investigator, Charles Humphreys, was found shot six times in the torso and once in the head. Finally, on 19 November, the body of Walter Gino Antonio was found, shot dead by four .22 calibre bullets.
In each case the victim was a middle-aged, heterosexual male. They all appeared to have been killed in or near their cars, just off one of the state highways, and hidden in nearby scrub or woodland. Some were partially stripped, but no evidence of sexual or physical abuse could be found. Used prophylactics found near some of the bodies suggested that they had been involved in a sexual encounter before they were murdered.
In every case, money, valuables and the victim’s vehicle had been stolen. The cars were generally found dumped shortly after the murder with the driver’s seat pulled well forward, as if to allow a comparatively short person to reach the drive pedals.
When it was found that the same handgun was being used in each of the killings the police were forced to accept that they might have a serial killer on their hands; yet, disturbingly, the murders did not fit any known pattern. Why would a heterosexual serial murderer kill middle-aged men? On the other hand, if the killer was homosexual, why was there no evidence of sexual abuse?
It was the FBI’s profiling unit that provided the startling answer: the killer was probably a woman. Predictably, media attention, which had been minimal, grew exponentially when this was revealed.
At least the Florida police started the investigation with a solid lead. Many serial killers steal from their victims, but usually for souvenir purposes only. The Florida Highway Killer was clearly stealing for profit. The money or valuables might be traced when she used or sold them.
As it turned out, the killer made an even more serious blunder. On 4 July 1990, she and her girlfriend skidded off the road in a car she had stolen from Peter Seims, a 65-year-old part-time missionary she had killed in early June, somewhere in southern Georgia. Witnesses told the police that they had seen the two women—one tall and blonde, the other a short, heavy-set brunette—abandon the damaged Pontiac Sunbird after removing the licence plates.
Police took detailed descriptions of the pair, but did not initially connect them with the highway killings. When it became clear that they were looking for a female killer they reviewed the Seims case and, since he was still missing, added him to the list. They also issued artist’s impressions of the two women with the request for further information. It seemed the case was taking a new turn; they might have a pair of female murderers on their hands.
By December 1990, the police had two names to attach to the artist’s sketches, thanks to tips from members of the public. The brunette was possibly one Tyria J. Moore, a 28-year-old occasional hotel maid, and the blonde could be her live-in lover, a 34-year-old prostitute who went under several names, one of them being Lee Wuornos.
Shortly afterwards, a check on a Daytona pawn shop revealed several items that had belonged to Richard Mallory. The pawn ticket that went with the belongings was made out to a Cammie Green, but the statutory thumbprint—that all Florida pawn tickets must carry—proved to be that of Wuornos.
The police arrested her outside the Last Resort bikers’ bar on 9 January 1991. Shortly afterwards Tyria Moore was located at her sister’s home in Pennsylvania. Strangely enough, the officers who went to pick her up did not arrest her. Instead they took her to a nearby motel. What took place there has yet to be made clear, but it has been alleged that a deal was struck and, possibly, a contract signed.
To understand these claims fully it is necessary to look at the influence of the media on the case, and vice versa. Movies like The Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct had recently made serial killers and women outlaws two of the major money-spinners in the US entertainment industries. Even before Wuornos’ arrest, up to fifteen movie companies were rumoured to be offering film contracts for the story. An obvious target for such money would be the investigating officers.
By the time of her apprehension the police had ascertained that Tyria Moore could not have been directly involved in at least some of the murders. There were various witnesses who could swear that she was working as a motel maid at the time of these killings. If she was not charged with any criminal offence, the movie contract lawyers could bid for her story without infringing the ‘Son of Sam’ law. This ruling made it illegal for convicted felons to profit directly from their crimes. Any money from movies, books, press interviews and so forth went to the victims, or their families if the victim were dead.
It has been alleged that in return for immunity from prosecution—and a cut of the profits—Moore signed a contract with officers Binegar, Henry and Munster to sell her story, in conjunction with theirs, to a movie company.
Tyria Moore—who admitted that ‘Lee’ Wuornos had told her about at least one of the murders—agreed to help the prosecution in return for immunity from the charge of ‘accessory after the fact’. She led officers to the creek where Wuornos had thrown the .22 revolver used in the murders and, under police supervision, made eleven bugged phone calls to Lee in prison. In them she claimed that she was still undiscovered by the police and urged Lee to confess. Wuornos, who was plainly still in love with Moore, tried to soothe her and agreed to make a statement.
On 16 January 1991, Wuornos gave a three-hour video-taped confession in Volusia County Jail. In it she admitted to killing Mallory, Spears, Carskaddon, Seims, Burress, Humphreys and Antonio. She also gave details that only a witness to the murders could have known, apparently confirming her testimony. Defending her actions, she insisted that she had only gone to the woods with them to trade sex for money. Each of the seven men had tried to attack or rape her, she said, forcing her to kill them in self-defence. When asked why she was confessing, she replied that she wanted to clear Tyria Moore’s name.
It was decided that Wuornos was to be tried for each murder separately. Her defence counsels contended that it would be prejudicial to the trial if the jury heard evidence connected with the other murders, but at the first trial, for the killing of Richard Mallory, Judge Uriel Blount Jnr ruled otherwise. Florida’s Williams Rule allowed evidence of similar offences to be revealed to a jury when the judge considered it important to the case. Of course, this seriously undermined Wuornos’s claim that she had fired in self-defence. To believe that even a hardworking street prostitute had to kill seven men in the space of a single year stretched the jury’s credulity to breaking-point.
For some reason the defence lawyers declined to call character witnesses for the defendant and, incredibly, did not inform the court that Richard Mallory had previously served a prison sentence for rape. It is possible that this was done deliberately to increase the chances for a claim of mis-trial at any ensuing appeal, but it left Lee Wuornos with hardly a leg to stand on in court. The jury found her guilty and Judge Blount sentenced her to the electric chair.
At a subsequent arraignment for three of the other murders, Wuornos pleaded unconditionally guilty and requested the death sentence without trial on the grounds that she wanted to ‘be with Jesus’ as soon as possible. It seems likely that this was an all-or-nothing gamble to win the judge’s sympathy and receive life imprisonment instead of further death sentences. Wuornos became outraged when the judge complied with her request, shouting that she was being executed for being a rape victim. As she left the courtroom she loudly wished similar experiences on the judge’s wife and children.
Lee Wuornos remains on Death Row as of this writing (May 1993). Before the Mallory trial, the ‘Son of Sam’ ruling remained in force; but, bizarrely enough, the US Supreme Court has recently overturned this law. It is now theoretically possible for a person to become a murderer with the ultimate goal of making money. Lee Wuornos, who has regularly complained that others were making a profit from her suffering, is now allegedly charging $25,000 for interviews and may sign as many movie contracts as she wishes.
Of course, it is arguable that the money will do her little good if she is on her way to the electric chair, but recent revelations concerning the officers who apprehended Tyria Moore may change even that. Following a bugged telephone call, in which he spoke of a movie deal, Major Dan Henry has resigned. The other officers, Sergeant Bruce Munster and Captain Steve Binegar, have been transferred from the Criminal Investigation Division. If it is found that the detectives had received money during the investigation, it is possible that all Lee Wuornos’ death sentences might be overturned.
In conclusion, there is one important question to be considered: is Aileen Wuornos really a serial killer? If we discount her own defence, that she was a victim of circumstance, we are left with a tantalizing lack of motive for the murders.
Some have argued that she killed simply for financial profit: robbing a client, then shooting him to silence the only witness. To support this view it has been pointed out that she was clearly desperate not to lose her lover, Tyria Moore. On her own part, Moore appears to have been unwilling to work during the period of their relationship, but insisted on living in expensive motels. It seems clear that she knew how Wuornos was getting her money, but never objected to it—even after Lee had told her about the murder of Richard Mallory.
There may indeed be some truth in this theory, but it does not seem enough to explain the murder of seven men, none of whom would have appeared particularly well-off. A more likely theory is that Wuornos killed to revenge herself on men.
She was brought up by her grandparents when her real parents abandoned her as a baby. She has claimed that she was regularly beaten and occasionally sexually abused by her grandfather throughout her childhood. When she was 13, she was driven into the woods and raped by a middle-aged friend of her grandparents. From her early teens on it appears that she made money through prostitution and claims to have been beaten up and raped by clients quite often. She had several affairs and was married to a man fifty years her senior, but they all ended acrimoniously. It was only with Tyria Moore that she seemed to be reasonably happy.
On the available evidence, it seems likely that the first victim, Richard Mallory, may well have raped Wuornos. Did this push her into serial crime?
Over 1990 she admits to having had hundreds of clients, all but seven of whom she apparently had no trouble with. On the other hand, the similarities between the murder victims and the circumstances of the rape when she was 13 are unmistakable.
Perhaps, like Arthur Shawcross, the ‘Genesee River Killer’, her trigger was resistance or threat. She may indeed be telling the truth when she insists that the men she killed threatened her and refused to pay after sex. This may have thrown her into a rage in which she—justifiably, in her view—shot them dead.
Whatever the reasons, she has caused a major stir in law enforcement circles. The possibility that she may be the start of a new trend in serial murder has disturbing ramifications. As Robert Ressler—former FBI agent and originator of the term ‘serial killer’—said of the case: ‘If Wuornos is said to be a serial killer we have to rewrite the rules.’
Since the conviction of Aileen Wuornos, Britain has also convicted its first female serial killer, 23-year-old children’s nurse Beverley Allitt. She was arrested in May 1991, after tests on a blood sample from a five-month-old child suggested that someone had injected a large dose of the drug insulin, used in cases of diabetes. And since Paul Crampton was not diabetic, this had brought him very close to death.
Beverley Allitt had been hired as a nurse in mid-February 1991. She was lucky; she had failed many job interviews, and her records—if anyone had bothered to consult them—showed that she suffered from a personality disorder that involved a constant craving for attention. But the small Grantham and Kesteven General Hospital was short-staffed, and no one had replied to their advertisements for nurses. So Beverley Allitt was taken on a six-month contract. In the next fifty-eight days she was responsible for four murders, and attacks on nine other children that left several of them permanently disabled.
On 23 February, seven-week-old Liam Taylor was admitted to Ward 4 with a heavy chest cold. He became suddenly exhausted and listless; thirty six-hours later, his heart stopped, and he died in his parents’ arms. A post mortem revealed serious heart damage—of the kind that might be sustained by a middle-aged man who smoked and drank to excess.
After Beverley Allitt’s arrest, it was asked: why did this not instantly alert the authorities to the possibility that something suspicious was going on? After all, the death of a baby from something that should only happen to middle-aged men ought to raise urgent questions that are pursued until they are answered. But all this is being wise after the event. No one in that cottage hospital—in a peaceful midland town with a low crime rate—had the least reason to believe that they had a killer in their midst.
Ten days later, 11-year-old Tim Hardwick was admitted after a bout of epilepsy, and died of a massive heart attack. Doctors said that he had died of continual epileptic fits—although, in fact, he had had the last fit four hours before his death. But since the child had been an epileptic, this explanation was accepted.
The next baby to suffer a mysterious collapse was fifteen-month-old Cayley Desmond, whose heart stopped twice. She was transferred to the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham, where she recovered. No one noticed the black bruise under her armpit where air had been injected into her.
The fourth victim was five-month-old Paul Crampton. Three times in a week his blood sugar sank so low that he fell into a coma. The child became cold, clammy and listless. It was clear that he was suffering from hypoglycemia—caused by low blood sugar—yet there was no obvious reason for this. A sample of Paul’s blood was sent off for analysis to the University of Wales. Unfortunately, it was not marked urgent, and the intervention of Easter delayed the analysis further. It was fifteen days before the laboratory discovered that the insulin level in Paul’s blood was abnormally high—enough to suggest that someone had injected it…
On the day the blood sample was sent off, five-year-old Bradley Gibson was found to have stopped breathing. His parents rushed to the hospital and watched as doctors tried to revive him, using a manual pump to make him breathe. Transferred to the Queens Medical Centre, he recovered. But at home a few days later, he was unable to walk, or to control his bowels or his bladder.
Doctors at the Medical Centre decided that he must have been given the wrong drug by mistake, yet failed to pass on this disquieting information to the Grantham hospital. In fact, the ‘wrong drug’ was potassium, injected by Beverly Allitt.
The same week, three-month-old Becky Philips, one of a pair of twins, was admitted with breathing problems. After treatment she was allowed home. In the middle of that night she went into a coma. Her parents rushed her to hospital, but it was too late, and she died during attempts at resuscitation. It was diagnosed as a cot death. In fact, it was due to an overdose of insulin.
Concerned about their other twin, Kate, the parents decided to allow her to go into hospital for observation. Tests showed her to be completely normal and healthy. Yet before the day was over, she had had three attacks in which she stopped breathing. After the third, doctors failed in their attempt to start the heart, and her parents were told she was dead. After forty-two minutes, Kate suddenly began breathing again, and recovered. But the attack had caused permanent brain damage which meant that she would always be retarded.
Now, at last, on 12 April 1991, the tests on Paul Crampton’s blood—sent fifteen days earlier—revealed that he appeared to have been injected with insulin. The Grantham Hospital was immediately informed. Yet the information only caused bewilderment. How was it possible that such a thing could happen? The only explanation that suggested itself was that some member of the public was getting into the ward, and so one set of doors was locked. It would be another eighteen days before the police were finally informed. And in that time, three more children were attacked, and another one murdered. Christopher King had four attacks of ‘breathing difficulty’, and his parents were certain he was going to die; but when transferred to the Queens Medical Centre, he unexpectedly recovered. Patrick Elstone—again a twin—came close to death on two occasions, but recovered. Back at home, it was clear that he also had something wrong with his legs which prevented him from keeping up with his twin Anthony. But when two-month-old Christopher Peasgood stopped breathing twice, there was finally a clamour for something to be done. Medical staff requested that video cameras be installed, but were refused.
There would be one more victim, the thirteenth. On Monday 22 April, fifteen-month-old Clare Peck was admitted to Ward 4. Two hours later she was dead. Her blood showed an unusually high level of potassium, but her death was diagnosed as being due to asthma.
Incredibly, it was another eight days before the police were finally called in. The first thing they did was to examine the ‘ward notebook’ kept by nurses. They immediately noticed that some pages had been cut out—for example, pages relating to Paul Crampton, whose ‘insulin attack’ had led to suspicion. It took very little time for them to realize that the common factor in all the attacks—twenty-six of them—was the presence of the new nurse Beverley Allitt. When she left the ward, children who had suffered convulsions or breathing difficulties recovered; when she returned, the problems began again.
A search of Beverley Allitt’s bedroom revealed some of the missing medical records. Twenty days after the police had been called in, she was arrested. In November 1991 she was finally charged with four murders, eight attacks and ten cases of grievous bodily harm with intent. She had injected insulin and potassium—in one case putting it into the child’s drip—and when she had neither available, fell back on suffocation.
At first, parents found it unbelievable. The Philips, who had lost their daughter Becky, then almost lost her sister Kate, were particularly shattered; Beverley Allitt had been holding Becky when she died, and they were convinced that, far from attacking Kate, Beverley Allitt had saved her life. ‘Bev’ had become a family friend, who often called around after work to take Kate for walks; she was even asked to be her godmother.
Now a study of her medical record quickly revealed that Beverley Allitt should never have been let anywhere near a children’s ward. During her two years’ nurse’s training, she had had no fewer than a hundred and thirty days off with various ailments. She had repeatedly wasted doctors’ time with ailments varying from pregnancy to a brain tumour—all false alarms. This disorder is known as Munchausen’s Syndrome, in which patients present themselves at hospitals with an endless series of imaginary ailments; it seems to be due to a craving for attention.
None of the doctors who studied her record was able to discover why Beverley Allitt had developed this peculiar illness. Until the age of 13 she had been a perfectly normal child. Then she began to lie, and to behave with cruelty towards friends. (Other cases in this book suggest that such personality change is often the result of a blow on the head, but nothing of the sort seems to be recorded of Beverley Allitt.) Her ex-boyfriend, Steve Biggs, told how he had broken off the affair as a result of her outbursts of violence. ‘She’d get mad and kick me in the balls.’ When she criticized his driving—on the day she passed her test—and he told her to shut up, she hit him in the face when they were travelling at sixty miles an hour. This was the last straw; but when he told her that he intended to break off the engagement, she grabbed him by the hair and forced him to his knees—he had to be rescued by her sister.
After her arrest, when her destructive urges could no longer be directed at children, they turned inward, and she was often unable to appear in court as a result of anorexia nervosa—the ‘slimmer’s disease’.
On 28 May 1993, she was found guilty on all counts, and given thirteen life sentences. Mr Justice Latham told her; ‘There is no real prospect that a time will ever come when you will be safely released.’
On the day of her sentence, a prison psychiatrist, Dr James Higgins, revealed an interesting sidelight on her motivation. Commenting on her low self-esteem, and her failure to win a place on a nursing course, Higgins quoted her as saying: ‘I had to prove I was better than what people thought.’
At first this sounds baffling. Surely murdering helpless children and betraying the trust of their parents proves you are worse, not better, than ‘people thought’? But then it becomes clear that she was not speaking about being morally better. She was speaking of feeling superior. ‘You may regard me as a nobody, but there’s far more to me than you think. In fact, I’m highly dangerous.’
Suddenly we can see that this is one of the basic motivations of the serial killer. Why did Jack the Ripper and Neil Cream write letters to the police? Why did Peter Kürten like to return to the scene of his murders, and listen to the horrified comments of sightseers? Why did John Collins go to a funeral home and ask if he could photograph the corpse of his latest victim? We can see that it is a craving to feel ‘different’, to feel superior. But is not the act of murder itself enough to convince someone that they are not like other people? Obviously not. We may as well ask why an actor wants to read his reviews, or why a beautiful woman wants to look in a mirror. Human consciousness is feeble; our memory is short. We want to have our sense of ‘difference’ confirmed by other people.
In other words, you could say that serial murder is the underachiever’s way of feeling a ‘somebody’. And to recognize this is suddenly to understand why there have been so many serial killers since the Second World War. For more than two centuries now, western society has insisted on the equality of man. But when there exists an enormous social gulf between rich and poor, this makes little practical difference. The ‘gentleman’ seems to be a gentleman by inborn right; the poor man may be his equal before the law, but he doesn’t feel it. Even if he happens to belong to the ‘dominant 5 per cent’, he is still inclined to accept a sense of social inferiority.
Two world wars and the ‘caring society’ have changed all that. As social differences are erased by education—and television—everyone feels that he has some right to a share of the prizes. The pop star may be more responsible for this change in attitude than anyone else; he demonstrates that it is possible to be working-class, an educational dropout, and still become an international icon and a multi-millionaire. (It is significant that Charles Manson wanted to become a pop star, and that the first murders took place in a house that had recently been vacated by a recording agent against whom he had a grudge.)
But on our overcrowded planet, there is still as little ‘room at the top’ as ever. The result is an ever-increasing number of dominant personalities who feel alienated, frustrated and resentful. A large percentage of these become petty crooks—muggers, burglars, car thieves. A very tiny percentage become serial killers.
Yet even this insight leaves a major question unanswered. In the years since the term ‘serial murder’ was invented, cases have succeeded one another with such frequency—usually overlapping—that they produce the impression of an epidemic. The increasingly gruesome nature of the crimes lends urgency to the question: what is there about our society that incubates this atavistic urge to kill?
At least part of the answer has emerged during the course of this book. Most serial killers have deep emotional problems; seldom overpowering enough to allow us to regard them as insane, but sufficient to make them totally self-absorbed, so that they regard other people as abstractions. This also produces a sensation of meaninglessness—what psychologists call ‘lack of affect’, inability to feel. Jeffrey Dahmer spoke for most serial killers when he said in a prison interview: ‘I couldn’t find any meaning in my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.’ When the mind is becalmed, negative impulses multiply like algae in a stagnant pond.
Dahmer’s biographer Brian Masters has argued that we need to stretch the definition of insanity to cover murderers like Dahmer and Chikatilo. Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who studied Shawcross, is inclined to agree. ‘I think it does very bad things to our society if we become a mindless group of people that doesn’t care why someone did what he did, and thinks only in terms of punishing the individual or doing away with him.’
John Douglas, head of the Quantico profiling unit, takes a more pragmatic view.
We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the victims. So what I flash back to is victims who are screaming, begging for their lives. I have tapes here of victims who are being murdered, who are regressing in their behaviour, calling out for their mammies, calling out for their daddies, and begging ‘Please God don’t kill me.’ But they kill them. So when I see the day of execution, and the little vigil outside the penitentiary, I may feel sorry for a second, but then I want to pull out the file jacket of these guys, I want to look at those crime scene photographs, I want to look at that autopsy protocol, and look at those autopsy photographs. I want to see the interviews of the victims and the families. I want to put myself back into that victim. So I have no sympathy at all for these people.
But surely the two points of view are reconcilable? Those who lack Douglas’s experience—or lack the imagination to understand what he is saying—may feel sympathy for killers like Dahmer, Chikatilo and Shawcross. But the sympathy is irrelevant. What is needed is real understanding. Dorothy Lewis expressed it as well as anyone when she said: ‘If we’re going to be a humane society, we have to protect ourselves, but we also have to understand what made these people the way they are, and then work very hard to try to prevent society creating more people like that.’
What this book makes clear is that at the present stage, our understanding is so crude as to be almost non-existent.
1 I owe this observation to the criminologist Candice Skrapec.
2 New Society, 4 March 1988.