It was not what I expected for such a notorious man. After all, he was the killer that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was based upon, and our nation’s first true celebrity serial killer. But when I finally did meet him, he sat hunched, old, and alone.
The room was like this. There was the harsh glare of the black-and-white television. A few feet away, there was the chatter and occasional jarring hoots of deranged laughter. Away from the haze of cigarette smoke around some coffee-drinking card players, Ed Gein sat. No one in the common room full of patients and nurses really knew about him, about who he was and what he once did. He never gazed out the mesh wire-covered windows either, at the blue-gray lake nearby or at the people strolling along the path toward it or into the flourishing greenhouse directly underneath his window. He merely sat.
He was a shadow of the man who the little children in Wisconsin feared like some boogyman. “Don’t go across the street,” mothers would warn. “Don’t go down to the river or play on the railroad tracks or down in the basement. Ed Gein will get you.” And the children listened, and later in life they too would warn their offspring. As flames crackled around campsites, ghost stories were told about him. There were dolls bearing his likeness. An amateur humorist crafted lyrics about the mild-mannered serial killer (which are on the Internet to this day), to be sung to the tune of the old 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. He was no longer the crazed killer portrayed in badly written true-crime books, no longer the sociopathic figure used as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s interpretation of Robert Bloch’s tale Psycho. He was certainly not larger than life. As a patient at the Mendota Mental Health Institute, Ed Gein was just an old man all used up and getting ready to die.
I was a staff psychiatrist at Mendota, where my duties included everything from admitting disturbed patients to being called upon to appear in court to testify about patients’ mental states. To me, Mendota was an idyllic place with a soulful history, a place to work hard, yes, but also a place in which I could meditate, forget about murder and psychiatry, and just enjoy the beauty of the outdoors.
About a month after I began working at Mendota, I approached Ed Gein and told him I would like to ask him some questions, adding that I was a doctor and I wasn’t going to further sensationalize his already sensationalized life. I bent over to look him in the eye and said, “I just want to understand a little more about you.”
“All already been said.”
“Just a little talk, Ed?”
“Well, sit down then,” he said, gesturing to a nearby chair. Ed Gein was suffering from dementia, and his short-term memory was impaired and nearly nonexistent, but the dementia did not affect what he recalled in the past. Gein very clearly remembered the details of what had transpired long ago. Like Richard Macek, Gein lived calmly in the controlled setting, and his attitude was good-natured and easygoing. Like Macek, he seemed to be a genuinely kind man—when he wasn’t killing.
“I heard that you did some things, Ed, some things that were not so good.”
“I did some things. I did ’em,” he snapped with a “so what?” kind of attitude. I had immediately touched a sore spot. It wasn’t that he didn’t like being reminded of his past crimes. Like a sideshow freak, Gein had been poked and prodded ever since his arrest in 1957. During that week of November 17, when his acts banished the cold war and the space race from the front pages of many midwestern newspapers, Gein himself was the most significant story. Wisconsin police had been searching for a handful of missing people dating back to the late 1940s, and they suspected Gein as the murderer. While the number of suspected killings wasn’t big, the manner in which Gein killed was highly unusual. He was convicted of the murder of Bernice Worden, whom he skinned, hung, and butchered, as if she were an animal whose carcass was being readied for market. Since the moment of that arrest, a parade of police, lawyers, and psychiatrists had repeatedly asked him the same questions. Sleazy journalists and Hollywood producers had promised him money and possible freedom for his story, and when he told them all he could, they never returned. At this point in his life, he just wanted to be left alone.
But I plodded on, speaking to him over the course of a casual ten-hour interview, spread over the period of two months. At that point, I had not formulated many of my theories about serial killers. I was still searching for more data and still putting together the general profile in which most serial killers could fit. Though I really didn’t think that my research on these murderers would add up to a life’s worth of data, I found I had an intense curiosity for more study.
Even though he lived in a town that was generally full of reserved, conservative people, young Ed Gein was the prototypical midwestern nice guy whose backwoods shyness made him the butt of jokes long before he stooped to murder. In the 1940s (and to some extent even today), Plainfield, Wisconsin, in Waushara County really was a “plain” town of several hundred residents. Gein inherited a sprawling 195-acre farm that had fallen into disrepair after his father, brother, and mother died. It has been widely but inaccurately reported that Gein began to kill because his father was abusive to the son he thought was a sissy. Augusta, his crabby, impatient mother, was a Bible-obsessed religious zealot who created a willing religious captive in Gein, who was said to have been unusually attached to his mother. When she died, as the inexact theory goes, Gein was supposedly absorbed into a world of mourning, which never really ended. He lived a life of constant sorrow, it’s said, which partially centered on making his vast and broken-down farmhouse a shrine to his deceased mom. But there was nothing I’d found in my research that indicated his controlling mother had led him to kill. Certainly, nothing that Gein said led me to believe that he harbored any unusual love or hate for his mother.
At Mendota, I asked, “Ed, they said you never got over your mother’s death. What do you think of that?”
“I cared about her. Cared about her a lot. But it wasn’t like I didn’t get over it. Everyone cares when their mother dies.”
“But they said you sealed off a lot of your house and made it a shrine to her, and that you kept your mother in that room after embalming her.”
“Those were just experiments. And the house was big. I left her room alone. But I closed off some of the house because it was just too darn big to heat, too darn big for one person.”
But it was true that he killed, as if it were a craft at which he would be an unparalleled master. Inside the house, sawed and hacked and roughly hewn, was a bowl made from half of a woman’s skull. Stretched taut, thin, and sewn tightly were lamp shades made of female skin. There was an unwieldy belt decorated not with studs or metal stars or knotted leather, but with a human head, nipples, noses, and a heart. Hung on doors were human heads, which were happened upon by boys for whom he babysat, souvenirs he said were shrunken heads from the South Seas. When the startled boys told their parents what they had seen, they simply weren’t believed. Gein was eccentric, said the townspeople, but he would never do anything bad.
Gein wasn’t just eccentric. He would literally prey on the dead. At the Plainfield cemetery a mile or two from his home, he dug up the grub-filled earth, prying open the coffins of the deceased, making off with their body parts: limbs, heads, and breasts.
Under the Wisconsin moon, which was his only witness, Gein would slip into a patchwork outfit made of skin and body parts, including breasts and a vagina, and he would dance. He would dance and sing and two-step and croon, parading around to songs only he could hear.
“Yeah, I did that” is all that he said to me.
I wished I had gotten more information directly from the mouth of Ed Gein, but he was drained and disinterested. With more questions than I had before I met Ed Gein and determined to discover more about serial murderers throughout history, I took to spending many long weekend days and evenings in the Madison university library, poring over as much information about the phenomenon as I could uncover.
I had thought that serial killers were a phenomenon of the last one hundred years of our history. And then I found someone the New York Times called “one of the most bizarre figures in European history.” Gilles de Rais was a handsome, wealthy baron and war hero who fought side by side with Joan of Arc in the 1400s. When Thomas Mann wrote about him, de Rais was said to personify “the religious greatness of the damned; genius as disease, disease as genius, the type of the afflicted and possessed, where saint and criminal become one.” But de Rais was no saint, by any definition of the word. From his three magnificent castles, especially one outside the French village of Machecoul, de Rais sent his servants to fetch unwitting peasant children. Lured, kidnapped, and sometimes boldly taken in broad daylight to de Rais’s palace, innocent children were subject to horrors rarely seen since the dawn of recorded history.
How wealthy was de Rais? The security provided by privilege in fifteenth-century France was even more magnificent and coveted than it is today due to the constant eruption of bubonic plague and the bloody Hundred Years War, which pitted the French against the emboldened, brutal English. It was a time of suspicion, of conjurers, of belief in the dark power of demons, of the Catholic Church’s omnipotence, of hope in alchemy and geomancy, of overriding terror about death and desperate attempts to overcome its clutches. It was into this milieu that Gilles de Rais was born.
After victory with Joan of Arc at the Battle of Orleans, Gilles became a marshal of France, a hero. When he rode into town, he rode a horse bedecked with jewels and ornaments at the head of a royal parade of two hundred soldiers he employed. Children, the most beautiful preteens with angelic voices from his own music school, sang his praises as they too rode on horseback. When he wasn’t strutting around, he wrote plays in which he was the star center stage, backed by lavish theatrical backgrounds, and he offered gifts and feasts to those who came to take it all in. De Rais wasn’t grandiose, he just did these things to meet certain cultural expectations. For de Rais, such parades were part of the trappings of his life and times. Other French nobles had huge entourages when they traveled from place to place. And as we’ll see later, the infamous John Wayne Gacy did similar things within his modern-day community. He arranged backyard barbecues where hundreds of people communed, and he put together a big Polish parade in the Chicago area where luminaries gathered.
George Bataille, the author of The Trial of Gilles de Rais, points out that some of de Rais’s life was not unlike the lives of other feudal lords of the time, “with whom he shares the pleasures of egoism, laziness and disorder. He lives in the same way, in those heavy and luxurious fortresses, among the men-at-arms in his service, and in contempt of the rest of the world.” He existed in a “contradictory chaos of calculation, violence, good humor, bloody disorder, mortal anguish.” So it was also for his relations, mighty feudal lords with vast authority over peasants and servants. De Rais’s parents died in 1415, leaving the eleven-year-old Gilles in the care of his rich thug of a maternal grandfather, Jean de Craon. Instead of educating the child with books and Latin (as he had promised Gilles’s parents) and passing on to him a grandfather’s wisdom and care, Jean left de Rais with only the most minimal schooling or supervision. In doing so, says Bataille, he created a wild young pit bull of a child, free to explore any path, criminal or not, to which he was inclined.
I don’t believe it was de Rais’s upbringing that led him to kill, but that’s how even the writers of the time rationalized his crimes. In fact, de Rais spoke of his wayward childhood with a scribe who wrote, “On account of the bad management he had received in his childhood, when, unbridled, he applied himself to whatever pleased him, and pleased himself with every illicit act…. He perpetrated many high and enormous crimes…, since the beginning of his youth, against God and His commandments.”
De Rais became a warrior under the tutelage of two men: Guilliaume de La Jumelliere, an Angevin lord and military adviser, and Georges de La Tremoille, a politician so close to King Charles VII that he was considered to be the prime minister. With Joan of Arc in the Battle of Orleans, de Rais proved as unstoppable and almost as driven as the future saint and returned home a war hero…and somehow changed for the worse.
By 1432, de Rais was killing in earnest. De Rais sent his servants to town to search out the prettiest children, mostly boys (although a few girls were gathered up as well). His lackeys lied to parents, sometimes saying the great, heroic baron was going to send their sons or daughters away for a proper education or that they were being sent out of the country to escape the ever-threatening English. To the starving, they would simply offer a loaf of bread. If parents weren’t around, the accomplices simply snatched up the children as they played in the street, put them on the backs of their horses, cleaned them up, and brought them to de Rais’s castle.
De Rais reveled in children’s panic as they were brought to him, led down the long, clammy halls. Invariably he was drinking, but I don’t believe it made him kill. Alcohol might have decreased the ability he had to keep himself together, but it didn’t cause his crimes. When a person is really drunk, he can’t do much of anything, so my guess was that de Rais wasn’t completely out of it. What happens with many normal people is that they lose inhibition when under the influence, but this doesn’t occur with the serial murderer, and it can’t be seen as a trigger. Most serial killers don’t have any one thing I can point to that leads them to kill. So it was with de Rais and drinking.
Alcohol or not, imagine the child’s fear as he was escorted into a room where de Rais stood. Beside him were mechanical implements used to raise the child by the neck and hang him with cords so that his terrified cries would be muffled. Just before the child passed out from choking, he would be lowered and freed. De Rais would hug him and dote on him, comforting the boy by saying he was merely playing a joke. As the child calmed down, de Rais would raise a braquemard, a large horseman’s sword with a wide flat blade, pointed and sharp at both edges. Carefully lowering the sword, he cut a vein on the neck of the child. At that point, he began to masturbate as the blood spurted wildly with every waning heartbeat. De Rais enjoyed slicing open the belly of a child and masturbating until he climaxed into it. His valet, Poitou, a boy he had raped but kept alive for what de Rais saw as his unparalleled physical beauty, said the killing involved “sometimes be-heading or decapitating them, sometimes cutting their throats, sometimes dismembering them, and sometimes breaking their necks with a cudgel.”
De Rais’s was indicted on October 11, 1442, by the French Catholic church for the murder of 140 children over the course of fourteen years. Two weeks later on October 26, he was hanged before a large crowd and then burned. Though the church’s indictment states that he began to murder children in 1426, the first victim’s parents said the killings started in 1432. De Rais himself affirmed that later date in his confession. It is a crucial date, since it also coincides with the death of the elder de Craon on November 15, 1432. De Rais began to kill once his closest relative had passed on. It was similar to Ed Gein in that Gein began killing after his mother died. And Richard Macek began his rampage after his father died. As with de Rais and Macek, even when they didn’t like their parents, something about a parent’s death was one of the triggers that led them to murder. But were there other triggers? They may never be known, since the trail of these killings has long grown cold. Still, there were triggers. Something made de Rais dispatch his servants to retrieve children for him. Bataille notes that it may have been the site of barbarism during war that triggered de Rais’s fetish for blood. But there’s no real proof of this, only Bataille’s conjecture. Certainly thousands of others went forth in combat and later they never sought to murder scores of children. There must have been something else that plagued de Rais. He wasn’t simply a madman because he gravitated toward a certain type of victim, children. A madman would just kill anyone willy-nilly from all strata in society. Like other serial killers after him, de Rais chose to kill the marginal in society, those that were easily attainable. But as with Ed Gein and Richard Macek, what could that something else have been? I knew it wasn’t simply madness and it wasn’t sociopathy. But what was it? I didn’t yet know.
Not long after the terrible reign of Gilles de Rais, about eight hundred miles to the east, came the vicious fifteenth-century rule of Vlad Tepes, often nicknamed Vlad the Impaler. In most books, Vlad is considered to be a serial killer or mass murderer bar none. Wherever you search on the Web, you’ll find Vlad called by these names. But this is a myth as unreal as the vampire tale, since Tepes was not a serial killer at all. Nor was he actually a mass murderer. It’s important to say why this is true because the crimes of Tepes are so often misrepresented. That’s not to say he wasn’t a vicious murderer, but the labels are dead wrong.
Though he is widely considered to be the real-life template for Bram Stoker’s gothic 1807 novel Dracula, Vlad himself was no fang-baring ghoul of the undead. He did not morph into a flying bat who lived to prey on the necks and genitals of young women as they slept. Nor did vengeful townspeople seek to end the fiend’s immortal existence with a stake to the heart as he lay resting in his coffin.
However, sharpened stakes were to play an important role in the real-life story of Vlad the Impaler, the proud, darkly attractive ruler of the southern Romanian kingdom of Wallachia, south of Transylvania on the Arges River. Vlad was born in 1431 to a nobleman called Basarab. As a young boy, he was educated by monks and taught to fight with chain mail and sword, imagining the branches of trees were the limbs of Turkish sultans. Basarab ordered Vlad’s warrior training early, as Basarab saw not only Turks but also Hungarians, Germans, and Poles battling for control of the rugged Carpathian mountains. And he wanted his children to be ready—even though they were young. Romania had been fought over and divided for centuries—since the Roman Empire laid claim to the pagan territory in A.D. 106. By the time Vlad was born, the Turks ruled much of the edges of Western Europe, hoping to spread to the Far East and farther west.
A fifteenth-century royal weaned on the ways of warriors, Vlad was one of the more passionate crusaders, a particularly sadistic Romanian who saw violence as the path not only to religious freedom and power but also to the religious superiority of a Roman Catholic world. In many battles against the Muslim Ottoman, Vlad Dracula proved his savvy…and his devious nature.
He sent his troops to kill with focus and purpose. Vlad the Impaler’s seemingly insatiable appetite for blood was not driven by some mad, unknowable inner lust. It had much more to do with his need for what today we call homeland security, the protection of Romania from outside invaders. Vlad’s imperious crusade to achieve rule over Romania was the work of a paranoid ruler full of religious fervor. If you were near Vlad, you wouldn’t give him a sideways glance for fear of retribution. If he didn’t like you, he’d kill you, in much the same way Saddam Hussein’s servants and soldiers lived in fear of Hussein and his retribution in Iraq. Again, this is not the work of a serial killer, who is triggered to kill, or a mass murderer, who kills out of anger against a society he feels has oppressed him.
In many history books, it is assumed that Vlad went mad after being taken prisoner by the Turks. Not only was he tortured in a dungeon in Adrianpole, but from his window he saw daily executions—beheadings, killings of prisoners by wild animals and impalements on sharpened poles, often through the genitals. He vowed that should he live through his imprisonment, he would do the same to the Turks. That pledge became a life’s mission when he discovered that the Turks had massacred his family, burying alive one of Vlad’s brothers. When the Turkish sultan freed Vlad in the late 1440s, the seventeen-year-old joined the Turkish Army, inwardly vowing revenge. After returning to Hungary to become prince, he began to kill. During a six-year reign of terror between 1556 and 1562, it’s said that he executed between 30,000 and 100,000 people. On one particular St. Bartholomew’s Day in the Romanian town of Sibiu, Vlad is said to have impaled 20,000 citizens on sharp, oiled stakes that were inserted slowly so the peasants would suffer more before they died. When Court TV’s crimelibrary.com and other Web sites list Vlad as a serial killer, he doesn’t fit the bill. He had major motives based in politics: to conquer, organize, and eliminate. Once these goals were met, he stopped his rampage.
A century later, a distant relative of Vlad Tepes began a series of murders that even today is difficult to comprehend. Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory was a vain beauty not only obsessed with her looks but also in constant search of a way to keep her body and face young for as long as she lived. Bathory, who ruled over a small portion of Hungary in the mid-1500s, utilized torture to discipline her servants—everything from making a young, suspected thief grip a sizzling coin until it burned and scarred her hand to taking an iron to the face of a servant whose work on a dress produced wrinkles instead of smooth cloth. Yet torture of peasants and servants was not uncommon during the Middle Ages. In fact, not long before the rule of Bathory, a peasant uprising was quashed by the Hungarian king. Their young leader was kidnapped; hours later he was grilled alive on a fiery throne. His followers were made to eat part of him. Then they themselves were hanged. Certain members of the ruling class devoted so much time to creative methods of torture that it was almost a kind of entertainment, pastime, or sport. Unfortunately, the lower classes were generally treated by royalty as though they were mere animals and severe force had to be used to discipline them. What led Bathory to be remembered by historians was the reason she killed over 650 virgin girls in the course of thirty years of despotic rule. In order to preserve her youth, which she believed was leaving her after giving birth to two children, the forty-year-old woman felt the need to bathe in the fresh blood of virgins. She was said to have taken a spike-filled cylindrical cage and then inserted a victim inside. She had the cage lifted up by a servant, then jabbed young girls with a burning poker. As they would jump back, they’d impale themselves. Bathory then sat herself beneath the cage, showering in the blood that spewed onto her.
The spurting blood of these teens (who were still alive as she bathed) was believed by Bathory to be the fountain of youth. It was only when the countess began to prey on females who were of minor nobility that the judicial system became concerned. Countess Bathory had also become slipshod in her disposal of the bodies, occasionally having the corpses thrown out of her carriage onto the road when she was done with them. And when she ran out of virgins in her own town, she sent her henchmen far and wide to procure more—which became extraordinarily costly, even for a woman of Bathory’s immense means. Finally, Bathory began calling on old loans that her deceased husband made to the king, who was as wily as he was wrathful. Realizing that local law held that prisoners had no right to monies a freeman had right to, he called for Elizabeth’s immediate capture and arrest. She was ultimately kept sealed in her castle chamber—for women of nobility were rarely placed in prisons in the Middle Ages. For the rest of her life, Bathory was kept safely away from the virgins she yearned for.
But Bathory was not a serial killer according to my definition. Like Vlad, she may have been unduly suspicious. She may have punished her servants severely. And she may have been ruthless in her quest for blood in the bain. But she had a focus and a reason for each killing. She wanted to remain beautiful. While the acts were far more atrocious than those of our current upper classes, who stick themselves with needles filled with poisonous Botox to remove their wrinkles or suck fat from their thighs or tie up their intestines to eat less and reduce their weight, the hoped-for effect of Bathory’s bloody lotion was the same. I don’t believe her killings had anything to do with strange sexual preferences. Nor were they combined with a deep aggression. Her horrible actions were just something she believed she had to do to remain pretty. Killing those virgins was the only way she felt she could make her belief reality.
In Chicago near the turn of the twentieth century, a strange man built something he called a castle. A pharmacy and other stores were on the first floor, but above the first floor it was like one of those old fun-houses, a chaotic maze of a place with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The second floor, for instance, had thirty-five rooms when the building opened for business in May 1890. As the public flocked to his drugstore, above which was his castle full of Romanesque columns and frescoes, the strange man grew wealthy.
H. H. Mudgett, a pharmacist who also called himself Dr. Holmes, was like a mad scientist out of a B movie. He liked to inspect his place, opening and closing fifty-one creaky doors on the second floor, firing up a kiln with a cast-iron hatch, inspecting tubs of acid and quicklime, testing chutes that led to the basement. To sealed rooms he added gas jets, stairways that went up but ended at a wall, and trap doors. He also built an instrument like a modern-day rack that was said to be able to stretch a person to twice his height. Dr. Holmes, not a doctor at all, was later thought to be insane. He created a pharmacy that was more like a paeon to ugly architecture with its signs and gaudy paintings than it was a dispensary of medicine. In his identity of Dr. Holmes, Mudgett was an operator, a smooth conniver, a bigamist who thrived on swindling and schemed to fraud insurance companies from Chicago to Philadelphia.
Mudgett had a penchant for killing some of those with whom he had relationships and collecting their money—either their life savings or life insurance policies. In addition, during the high times of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Dr. Holmes attacked and murdered many wide-eyed fairgoers who used his castle as a kind of rooming house. The stealthy, fast-talking Mudgett often employed an accomplice to wash, clean, and articulate the bones, paid him about $30, then smirkingly sold the skeleton to local colleges for well over $250. He was indicted for murdering his most loyal assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, in late summer 1895, and that fall was sentenced to death by hanging. In a posttrial confession, he said he murdered twenty-seven people, though some estimate he killed as many as two hundred. But what put Dr. Holmes’s deeds into the serial killer category is the way he ruthlessly experimented upon the persons whom he murdered. Dr. Holmes cut his victims, skinned them, removed chunks of flesh, burnt them, prodded them, and placed them in acid baths. He left one wife in a sealed chamber to hear her scream for days as she gradually died of starvation.
If Dr. Holmes was thought to be an eclectic mad scientist who experimented and conspired to extort money to make his crimes complete, Captain Carl Panzram thrilled to kill. An accomplished sailor, he traveled the world over between 1918 and 1926, killing everywhere from Oregon to New York City to South Africa. He seemed to prefer terrifying young boys, and he had a nasty racist streak to boot. In the 20,000-word life story/confession he gave to his only friend, a prison guard, Panzram says he coaxed a twelve-year-old boy to his place of employment, the deserted Sinclair Oil Company grounds. There he assaulted and murdered him with a large rock which he bashed again and again into his head. Wrote Panzram, “I left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then I killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader.”
“His brains were coming out of his ears.” It was this kind of bragging that Panzram used to describe his crimes more than once. The sight of crushed brains seeping from the head not only proved his victim had expired, but also pointed to his pride in the creation of death. After all, it wasn’t that he killed by cutting the belly, which would be sloppy. Nor was it stabbing and shooting through the heart, the organ from which poets say romantic feelings emanate. Attacking the brain made sure that the center of intellect and thought and all things human, all things that we know and all things that we do not know, would be destroyed.
Traveling to what was then called the Dark Continent, he hired a group of natives from Lobito Bay to take him to hunt for crocodiles, which he said he would sell to merchants from Europe who were based in the Congo. When the men suggested that they were due a percentage of the profits, Panzram shot them—repeatedly—then tossed them overboard into the muddy river where the thick-snouted reptiles swarmed. The evidence of the crimes would soon be digested in their bellies. Then he quietly rowed the canoe back to Lobito Bay, without his reptilian booty, hurrying to leave the small town before being caught.
For Captain Panzram, killing was easy, and he often fancied himself not only as a dauntless mercenary but also as the world’s greatest hit man for hire. He daydreamed of blowing up bridges, of killing massive numbers of people, of raping some and of robbing others. While there was no remorse for what he did, Panzram admitted, “I preyed upon the weak, the harmless, and the unsuspecting.” Some might say this is an unusual degree of self-awareness for a serial killer. But they all know they’re going after people who aren’t going to fight back. Some, like Richard Macek, may not recall the actual details of a murder. But they certainly know that their victims aren’t strong and tough.
Like other serial killers, Panzram spoke to law enforcement officials of a spotty recollection. “I have killed a number of people in different places and some of the facts escape my memory,” he confessed. Despite his confession, he tried to defend himself in the courtroom, which must have been quite a sight to see. Panzram failed at his efforts miserably, threatening witnesses whose testimony he disliked by taking the index finger of his right hand and dragging it across his throat, as if to slit it. But when Panzram was eventually charged with murder, he admitted to twenty-two homicides and said he wished he had killed twenty-two more. Detectives asked him why he killed a child who was the picture of innocence. The angry, overly tattooed captain lashed out, “I hate all the fucking human race. I get a kick out of murdering people.”
In the Roaring Twenties came Albert Fish. The elderly, balding father of six with a thick gray mustache was based in New York City, and in photos he somehow resembled the actor Wilford Brimley, but with a fixed, cold glare. When I read his letters, I felt chilled. It’s one thing to use clinical terms in a medical conversation about someone being a cannibal. But the letter I read from Albert Fish to the parent of one of his victims was particularly gruesome and manipulative. Early in his letter, Fish talked of an acquaintance, Captain John Davis, who in a trip to the Far East had sampled the cooked flesh of children after spanking them “to make the meat tender.” Fish was intrigued. Imagining himself a kind of connoisseur, Fish wrote he “made up my mind to taste it.”
Six years after killing ten-year-old Gracie Budd and just ten days after Walter Winchell talked about her on his widely listened to radio program, Fish wrote about Davis to Delia Budd, Gracie’s mother.
On Sunday June the 3—1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her.
On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild-flowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them.
When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma.
First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.
Fish was said to be an emotionless prisoner who, when interviewed by detectives, explained that he had “a thirst for blood.” Outwardly, he was meek and polite. Prior to his capture, he had already been arrested for everything from sending obscene notes to grand larceny—but none of the charges stuck. Fish, who claimed he was constantly whipped at St. John’s Orphanage in Washington, D.C., also murdered young Billy Gafney, explaining that
I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears—nose—slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood.
I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head—feet—arms—hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach.
I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees [penis and testicles] and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears—nose—pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good.
Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about ¼ hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy.
Much as detectives found him emotionless, psychiatrists who interviewed Albert Fish claimed he was detached, that he didn’t care whether he lived or died. When examined by doctors, it was discovered that Fish had been inserting needles between his scrotum and rectum. X-rays, rushed to be developed, revealed twenty-nine needles in that area. Serial killers don’t usually abuse themselves in this way. I knew that what Albert Fish did wasn’t like someone who was a borderline personality disorder and is always cutting himself to let out the pain or to remember that he can still feel something. It may be that Fish needed to know what the pain he administered felt like. What I do know is what we’ll see over and over again in this book: serial killers like to experiment simply for the sake of experimentation. That’s what Albert Fish did, and it had no greater psychological meaning.
At the trial for the murder of Gracie Budd, it became clear that Fish’s children were privy to the old man’s odd nature, as they said they saw him drive nails into a board and then flagellate himself with it. The masochist even asked his children to hit him, and they occasionally agreed. Even when Fish sat strapped in the electric chair and was about to die, he told the guards that he couldn’t wait for the thrill of electricity to surge through his body. Electrocution, he said blandly, was one of the few thrills he’d never experienced. And then, his life was over.
After reviewing these historical cases, I thought about the similarities these serial killers may have shared. The first thing I noticed is that they weren’t considered by their peers to be odd, different, or dangerous. Their crimes were done carefully, and they were able to remain undetected for long periods of time. There was one fallacy I noted after researching de Rais’s trial. Serial killing was not a phenomenon only of the United States, one that, critics said, occurred because the societal values in America had declined. It was a worldwide phenomenon. And if serial murders happened as far back as de Rais, they have probably been going on since the dawn of the very first communities in the time of the caveman. I also realized that with Gein, it wasn’t necessary to be highly mobile to be a serial killer. You didn’t need access to highways and thruways and the interstate system to get away and cover your trail. All you needed to do was to blend in.
But I still needed to find out more. I needed to talk to serial killers more, understand them more fully, if that was at all possible. I had begun with a null hypothesis that held “there’s no difference among murderers.” But as I collected the data from history, I began to see that there was a distinction between the average murderer and the serial murderer: there was no great rage or any jealousy or any deep emotion at all that prompted serial killers to murder again and again.
I was obsessed with gathering more and more information, reams of it, in the hopes that I would someday yell “Eureka!” and find an answer to the question, Why do these killers kill? I thought, This is going to be a long, long process, one that will take years, one that could nearly exhaust me because it means profiling dozens and dozens of serial murderers. But I’m hooked; I’m really hooked.