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Canto XXXII, ll. 133–35

“O tu che mostri per sì bestial segno “O you who show by such a bestial sign
odio sovra colui che tu ti mangi hatred over him you are eating,
dimmi ‘l perchè,” diss’ io… tell me why,” I said…

Most of the persons described in the last chapter belong to Category 16 on the Gradations of Evil scale; a few, however, to levels a few steps below. In the case of Jeff Lundgren, his public acts (the murder of the Avery family) were consistent with that level, yet his private acts (the degradation of his wife in the most repugnant fashion) belonged to the worst level: 22, reserved for murders involving prolonged torture. Lundgren is one of those people who does not fit neatly into just one pigeonhole. Many of the acts the public is least hesitant about condemning as evil do not involve murder at all, as it turns out. We saw this with Lundgren and, ironically, even with Dale Pierre—two of whose victims managed, I suspect somewhat to their regret, to survive their suffering. By surviving, their suffering—both physical and psychological—extended for days and years beyond the few minutes after they were compelled at gunpoint to swallow the Dråno. Here we will confront the extremes: the serial killers (including those who seemingly made a profession out of torture), along with a few individuals whose physical torture of their victims was never meant to have ended in their death. To begin, we need to clarify what is meant by the phrase “serial killer.”

SOME DEFINITIONS

Aficionados of movies, television, and contemporary “airport” fiction will have noticed that the theme running through so many of the programs and books is, with almost monotonous regularity, serial killers. Perhaps because we in America no longer have a frontier, serial killers have replaced cowboys as objects of popular fascination. There is even a secret admiration, since these are men who do as they please, whereas the rest of us are obliged to rein in our more violent impulses.

Not all serial killers are cut from the same cloth; as a result, the phrase is used in confusing ways. There are three major varieties. The serial murders of patients by unscrupulous nurses and doctors—a few of whom we encountered in chapter 6—make up one of the less common varieties: one in which a sexual motif is lacking. A second variety concerns murders with fairly long intervals in between of random strangers, irrespective of age or gender. These killers are misanthropic men who simply hate people; again, there is no sexual motif. This is also the rarest type. Finally, there is the largest (albeit still uncommon) group: men committing serial sexual homicide. When people speak of “serial killers,” this is the type they usually mean. The sexual element is central to the type, since the scenario is one of rape followed by murder (more common) or else murder followed by sex with the corpse (this necrophilic type is less common).

We could even speak of yet another variety of serial killing with a sexual overtone but without rape. If we were to make this into a fourth type, it would truly be the rarest of all the varieties: serial homicide committed by women who are seeking vengeance symbolically for sexual wrongs done to them (incest, usually). But I prefer to categorize this scenario as an uncommon variant of serial sexual homicide—one in which more attention is paid to the motive than to the overt act. The men (and the rare women) in this category belong to the higher levels of the scale: Categories 17 to 22.

There are not many persons who devote themselves single-mindedly to torture in peacetime that do not show at the same time a perverse sexual preoccupation. In times of war or group conflict, there is no lack of torturers who serve as functionaries of the state: men (and a few women) who would not be recognized by their friends and neighbors as sadists or as otherwise abnormal people. They are just doing a nasty job that (according to what they have been made to believe by the leader or some other higher-up) just “has to be done.” After the conflict is over, most such persons return to their ordinary lives and their ordinary families, continuing to pursue their ordinary work. I in no way mean to place them outside the realm of evil; but theirs is a different kind of evil than the one we are focusing on in this book. For brevity, in this chapter “serial killer”—unless otherwise specified—will refer only to men who have committed serial sexual homicide. The FBI prefers to limit the phrase to men who have killed at least three persons, even though a pattern strongly suggestive of serial killing may emerge after only two murders (because of similarities in method and choice of victim). The reason for this definition is to allay anxiety in the public. There are more occurrences of two similar rape-murders than of three. If the media began writing scare-headlines after every instance of two such murders within a short time span in the same area, terror and hysteria would be rampant in the community, which might interfere with the painstaking detective work needed to catch the killer.1

DIVERSITY IN THE RANKS

When I began to study serial killers some twenty years ago, I knew of only a dozen or so. My main interest was to find peculiarities in their backgrounds that might help explain why they did what they did. The personality of serial killers was of special interest to me, since personality disorder was the area of my research and very little had been written about the topic at that time. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst trained during the 1960s, I had been taught that psychiatric conditions, even the most serious ones like schizophrenia, were caused by bad environment—which usually meant bad parents, which in turn usually meant bad mothers. Heredity was given short shrift, since it seemed that if you were born with a certain condition there was no point in trying to cure it: this was an affront to our American optimism that said you could cure anything (provided you weren't born with it). Only after I finished my training did I come to the realization that “nature” was of great importance in understanding psychiatric conditions; not only that, but that nature and nurture were inextricably bound up with one another, each interacting with the other in often complex and poorly understood ways.

I made a spreadsheet that contained a list of each serial killer with as many “variables” as I could think of that might help me understand the similarities and differences among serial killers (as well as among murderers of other types). For “nature” variables, I looked at the close relatives of each man: which relatives were mentally ill, which had committed crimes (especially crimes of violence). For “nurture” variables, I looked at the makeup of the family: Were the parents known to be caring and consistent? Had either been abusive to the future serial killer—either physically, verbally, or sexually? Which men came from intact homes, which from families where the parents divorced early on? Which ones came from fragmented families where the parents had so many divorces and remarriages that the family tree was a crazy quilt—where no one seemed to know who belonged to whom and no “caretaker” seemed much concerned with any of the children, stepchildren, foster children, half-siblings, and in general the chaotic mishmash that substituted for “family life”? How many of the men had been adopted, and what, if anything, did we know about their natural parents: Were they mentally stable? Had either been arrested for crimes? And what were the adoptive parents like—kind and devoted or neglectful and exploitative?

I realized that nature and nurture weren't the whole story: some of the men developed epilepsy or meningitis or some other disease of the brain that might have an effect on future behavior. Others met with serious head injuries that caused long periods of unconsciousness and damaged key areas of the brain that were important in governing behavior. Sometimes these injuries were just plain bad luck. But sometimes bad parenting helped to create this bad luck: a neglectful parent might ignore a rambunctious son whose wild behavior leads to a head injury. Then there is the occasional parent who, to turn the phrase around, added injury to insult by smashing a boy's head with a wooden plank. This was but one of the indignities visited upon Henry Lee Lucas by his mother.2

Before these men became serial killers, a great many of them engaged during their adolescence in what some have called “rehearsal” behaviors: assaults on family members or strangers, armed robbery, arson, and animal torture. They graduated over time from these types of (juvenile) delinquent acts to the sex-murders by which they would later become identified. Material of this sort went into my spreadsheet as well. Another item of great importance is drug abuse. Alcohol and many of the street drugs like cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and angel dust3 have the effect of priming the pump toward action (murderous action, in this case) by drastically lowering inhibitions and by clouding judgment. Here again, nature and nurture are often intertwined: some of the serial killers had alcoholic parents who either passed on their genetic tendency to alcoholism or at least taught their sons—by example—the charms of liquor.

When I started out and knew only of those dozen or so serial killers, I couldn't make any generalizations about drug abuse. But now, twenty years and 130 serial killers later, it's clear that a third of the men had one or both parents who were alcoholic. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler; John Wayne Gacy; and Peter Sutcliffe, England's Yorkshire Ripper (nicknames being the norm rather than the exception among these men) all had alcoholic fathers. Tommy Lynn Sells and Mike DeBardeleben had alcoholic mothers. In the families of Gary Heidnick and Henry Lee Lucas, both parents were alcoholic. With some of the men, alcohol was both a nature and a nurture factor: before Gary Heidnick grew up to become Philadelphia's Cellar of Horrors killer (chaining black women to his cellar wall, raping, and then killing them), his alcoholic father used to get into a rage when four-year-old Gary was crying—and would then suspend his son outside a fourth-floor window by his feet, threatening to drop him if he didn't stop crying.4

One of the problems I encountered in my search for the causes of serial killing stemmed from having to rely mostly on biographies, since I was able to interview personally only a small number of men. The biographies told me a great deal about the personalities of these men and something about their immediate families and past criminal records. But little mention was made about certain aspects of their past that we now know are very important tip-offs to later antisocial or even violent behavior. One such tip-off that got a lot of attention forty years ago—its accuracy has been debated back and forth since then—is the triad of childhood fire setting, bed-wetting, and animal torture.5 Children whose behavior included this triad were considered at high risk for committing crimes (that might include sexual crimes) as they became adults. Since arson is a crime, it is likely to come to the attention of the authorities. Animal torture may not get much attention at first, but that part of a serial killer's history comes to the surface after he is arrested, thanks to all the investigative work that surrounds the arrest and trial. But bed-wetting is no crime, so it is often ignored. From the biographies, I found that about one serial killer in twenty was known to show the whole triad. There were just as many who were known to have set fires and tortured animals (usually cats) but whose bed-wetting (or, more medically, enuresis) history was unknown. David Berkowitz, known to most of us as the “Son of Sam” for his lover's lane murders of 1976, recorded the number of fires he set in his teen years: 1,488.6 He also tortured animals. Did he also have enuresis? We don't know. In any case, animal torture is a much more important indicator of possible violence in the future, because a boy setting a cat on fire or hurling rocks at a dog means that he has no compassion for living creatures, is indifferent to their pain, and is in all likelihood getting vengeance vicariously for being treated outrageously by one or another parent. There are many serial killers, such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Ed Kemper, Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), and Arthur Shawcross, who were brutalized by a parent and who also tortured animals.

Attention-deficit disorder in children and adolescents (exhibited as inability to concentrate and tendency to be fidgety, restless, and irritable) is another risk factor for later antisocial behaviors.7 ADD, as it is usually abbreviated, is more common in boys than in girls; the tendency is often passed from father to son. Many serial killers probably had this condition in their younger years, but it is seldom mentioned in their biographies. An exception is Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles Night Stalker, who, as we now know, had ADD as a child.8

Looking at all of these and similar risk factors made one thing clear, however: there is no one-size-fits-all profile for serial killers. Instead, there is a complicated mix of nature and nurture adversities, on top of which are still other highly unpredictable situations, such as being born “funny-looking,” which leads to being mocked by classmates. Coming from a poor or even a working-class family adds to the chances for aggressive behavior,9 as does coming from a culture of machismo, where it is common for men not only to control women but to use physical force to exercise that control. Or, there may be a seduction by a close relative early in one's life that suddenly and drastically creates an obsession, an idea that one can never get out of one's mind and that shapes forever the pattern of one's behavior. The pattern—here, an addiction really—may be one of violent revenge that one must carry out again and again on all who resemble those who mistreated him in adolescence. I will give an example of a serial killer transformed and transfixed by such an experience in his midteens. But before that, I would like to provide a “menu” of characteristics and occurrences before and after birth that we see more or less frequently in the ranks of serial killers: attributes that contribute importantly to the development of a serial killer, granted that no serial killer shows all of them, and a few show almost none.

THE MENU

From the Nature Side

Psychiatric Conditions (less severe, without psychosis)

Personality Disorders (inheritance accounts for about half the disorder)

From the Nurture Side

Of Mixed or Uncertain Origin

As one can see from this list, these characteristics could be assigned to a simple set of categories: Bad Genes, Bad Parents, Bad Luck (head injury, for example), Bad Drugs, and “Raging Hormones.”10 This menu, or “schema” can be understood as a collection of ingredients from which a prescription for violence in general may be written. The murderers and rapists sketched in previous chapters showed either a few or many items from this menu. What nudges some men who have a number of these characteristics to go in the direction of serial killing cannot easily be predicted just from knowing their particular attributes from the menu. There must in addition be either abnormalities of a sexual nature that account for the difference or an exaggerated thrill seeking that can be satisfied only by intense sexual experiences.

SEDUCTION AS A KEY ELEMENT IN A SERIAL KILLER

I became acquainted through my work in a prison with a man in his forties who had, in the context of sexual encounters, strangled four men over a period of about two years. He had been married and divorced but was predominantly homosexual. His pattern was to meet a man in a gay bar, promise an evening of sex back at his place, and then, after he had gotten quite drunk, take the man to a secluded spot, engage in sex, and immediately afterward strangle the man to death with the image in his mind that the victim was actually his mother. This man had grown up as one of five brothers, among whom he had the misfortune to be his mother's “favorite.” The father was a policeman; the mother, a security guard. A bulky, tough-as-nails woman, his mother was a formidable figure at home; she was the chief disciplinarian, and she used her guard's baton to exact the same measure of obedience and submissiveness in her children as she did with the miscreants she collared during her workday. The man I had gotten to know in the prison had been beaten often and severely by his mother (sometimes to the point of bleeding)—a punishment also meted out to his brothers. But because he was her favorite, she enticed him at age fourteen into having intercourse with her on a regular basis. From that point on, there seemed to be an oscillation between the two activities: beating one day, sex the next, beating the third day, sex the day after, until he finally left home at nineteen. He developed a blistering hatred for his mother, which he said was 70 percent because of the beatings and 30 percent because he knew her seducing him was wrong. In his alcohol-besotted state he was killing his mother over and over again. In addition he had strong psychopathic traits: he was an inveterate liar and con man, full of charm and glib speech.

From the standpoint of the Gradations scale, this man would be placed in Category 17 for serial sexual murder without torture. One might not think of him as an “evil” person; the evil resided in his habitual act when overcome by the urge to find and murder a potential victim in a bar. He was psychopathic but not sadistic; he was not a loner; in fact, he was extraverted, charming, and good-humored in ways that could have made him a supersalesman, were it not for his penchant for murder. He was also physically strong and athletically built, qualities that enabled him to overpower his prey. I believe it was the mother-son incest that created the pattern of sexual crime, but for which he may have either committed no crimes at all or only property crimes.

To show you something more about the diversity among serial killers, I'd like to take you now on a journey into the lower depths of serial murder and torture. If this were Dante, we'd have to dig a good bit deeper than his (lowest) Ninth Circle, because there were no people he described even at hell's “bottom” that did anything like the people you'll meet in this chapter. Throughout our journey, I will introduce people who exhibit most of the characteristics on the “menu” in the areas of nature, nurture, and what might be called misadventure (head injury, being raped while in a reformatory). These people will illustrate the various degrees on the Gradations scale—from 17 to 22.

MENTAL ILLNESS; PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS

Because of the common belief that anyone who would do the things serial killers do must be “crazy,” many would conclude they must all be “mentally ill.” Granted that “mentally ill” is a vague phrase, psychiatric circles still use it to refer to persons who suffer from an inborn major psychosis, such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder, and manic-depressive psychosis. Heavy abuse of LSD, angel dust, cocaine, methamphetamine, and, in vulnerable persons (adolescents, especially), marijuana can also create a lasting state of “craziness” that resembles schizophrenia. To make matters more complex, some people who start out with a psychotic condition also abuse some of these drugs, ending up with an aggravated psychosis: their original inborn illness is now made considerably worse by drug abuse. Within the ranks of serial killers, though, very few started out with a mental illness where hallucinations, bizarre ideas, and delusions—that is, a psychosis—were present independent of drug abuse. What is extremely common among serial killers is a (less severe) psychiatric disorder of some kind, particularly a personality disorder. It wouldn't be incorrect to assume that they all have a personality disorder—such as narcissistic, antisocial, psychopathic, sadistic, irritable/explosive, schizoid, or various combinations of several of these. It is not always so easy to make a correct diagnosis of mental illness in serial killers once they are on trial for their crimes, since a few feign psychosis in hopes of receiving a less severe sentence via an insanity defense. In the end, however, these attempts almost invariably fall flat.

PSYCHOSIS

Two of the most clear-cut cases of psychosis in a serial killer are those of Richard Chase and Joseph Kallinger. Both have been termed, I believe correctly, schizophrenic.

Richard Chase was born in 1950 in Sacramento into a working-class family where the parents bickered a great deal. His father was a strict disciplinarian and critical, but he was not really abusive. Richard showed peculiarities early on: he liked to set fires and torture animals while in elementary school. He used to bury the cats he'd killed in the backyard. In his teens he began to show signs of “weirdness”: whereas he was popular at first, his personality underwent drastic changes as he began to date girls. He was impotent on several occasions and began to abuse LSD, alcohol, and marijuana. A psychiatrist whom he saw briefly thought he had a “major mental illness” but did not suggest hospitalization. His behavior became more bizarre, and he became disheveled. He would nail his closet shut in the belief that people were “invading his space” from within the closet. Once he took himself to an emergency room complaining that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. On another occasion he claimed that bones were coming out through the back of his head or else that his heart had stopped beating. He was diagnosed as “paranoid schizophrenic” at this point, with the added note that hallucinogenic drugs were making his illness, whatever it was, a great deal worse. When his parents divorced, he lived with his mother but said he was being “poisoned.”

Apparently on the assumption that his impotence was caused by lack of blood, Richard became preoccupied with killing animals and drinking their blood and smearing himself with their blood. He would catch rabbits and tear their organs out, eating their entrails raw. Once he actually injected himself with rabbit blood—and, of course, became violently ill because of the blood incompatibility. He caught and tortured cats, dogs, even a cow. In his twenties he graduated to killing and disemboweling humans: a man, then two women, and three children, drinking their blood in the same vain hopes of curing his sexual dysfunction. With one of the women he committed his most depraved act after he killed her: carving off a nipple and stuffing animal feces in the mouth of her corpse. When he was finally caught in 1978, he was considered a “disorganized” type of serial killer, since his acts were accompanied by rage (one sign of which was multiple stab wounds) and because he made no attempt to hide the evidence of what he had done.11 He once even called the family of a dog he'd mutilated and told them that he was responsible.

Chase committed suicide in prison with antidepressant tablets he had saved up. Though considered mentally ill at trial, he did not win an insanity defense because he knew what he had done was wrong. Insanity is now simply a legal term signifying that an offender did not understand the nature of his act nor that it was wrong. One might quibble that serial sexual homicide was not the right term for Chase's crimes because he didn't always have sex with the victims, or if he did, it was only after (in several cases) they were dead; in other words, Chase performed necrophilic acts with some of his victims. But his motivation was certainly sexual in nature. Because of these variations, Chase does not fit neatly into any one of the categories of the scale. The fact that he shot some of his victims and stabbed others—without torture—is consistent with category 17. But the gruesomeness of his acts suggests that he belongs to the extreme end of the scale: Number 22. Mutilation after death can no longer be felt by the victim, however, so it is not considered “torture,” nor does it represent the kind of extreme sadism or torture that would place him at the far end of the scale.

Joseph Kallinger, in contrast, did torture his victims. Kallinger was adopted by a punitive couple in Philadelphia, who, besides beating him, also taunted him when he was an adolescent that his “bird” (that is, his penis) would never get hard. Although he later married and had several children, he always was obsessed with fears about his penis; in his late thirties he claimed God spoke to him, telling him to kill young boys and to cut off their penises. He eventually killed one of his sons (who had accused him of abuse), a young boy, and a nurse, whom he had sexually assaulted. Kallinger said at one point that he was 961 years old and had been a butterfly. There is some question whether Kallinger faked some of these bizarre responses or else exaggerated what he really felt in order to win an insanity plea. Psychiatrist Dr. John Hume, with whom I spoke and who had testified at the trial in October 1976, thought Kallinger had an antisocial personality and was otherwise malingering. The jury agreed and waved aside the insanity defense, consigning Kallinger to life in prison (where he died in 1996). Some experts felt Kallinger was “schizotypal” in personality: eccentric, with odd and magical beliefs but short of full-blown schizophrenia. One author who wrote up the case thought he was schizophrenic,12 but the truth of his mental state may elude us as to where acting crazy ends and being crazy begins. As far as is known, Kallinger did not abuse drugs, so, unlike Chase, whatever his mental state—mad, malingered, or a combination—drugs had not worsened it.

ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER

Richard Ramirez, who earned a measure of celebrity in the mid-1980s as the Los Angeles “Night Stalker,” had many more strikes against him than just Attention Deficit Disorder with hyperactivity (often abbreviated to ADD/H). I include him under this heading because he is one of the few serial killers whose history makes explicit mention of the condition. He grew up in El Paso, Texas, as the youngest of five children in a Mexican American family. Richard's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had all been extremely abusive physically toward their sons down the generations as a means of instilling discipline. Two of Richard's three brothers had gotten in trouble with the law for heroin addiction. Richard suffered at least two bouts of unconsciousness after head injuries: once, when a dresser he had been climbing fell over on him; another time, when a playground swing struck him. After the head injuries he began to have seizures, both grand mal (causing unconsciousness) and temporal lobe (causing strange visions or automatic movements but without unconsciousness). In the wake of these experiences, he also became hypersexual, aggressive, and prone to “visions” of monsters. In his midteens he began to abuse a host of hallucinogenic drugs: mescaline, LSD, angel dust, and cocaine.

Richard had a cousin, Mike Ramirez, who had served with the army in Vietnam. Mike boasted about his exploits there: rapes and beheadings of Vietnamese women, stealth killings, and the like, all of which made Mike a hero in Richard's eyes. Mike settled in Los Angeles (after being released for the murder of his wife, committed in full view of Richard) where Richard later joined him. By then, Richard had become reclusive, suspicious, and totally depraved. He began to sneak into the houses of people, mostly women, whom he would kill or rape. On one occasion he cut out the eyes of a victim and took them with him. Ramirez entertained grandiose fantasies of becoming more famous than Jack the Ripper.13 Arrested after his fourteenth murder, he told the authorities with his characteristic callousness: “You don't understand me…you are not capable of it. I am beyond good and evil,” and “I love to kill people. I love to watch them die. I would shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm…. I love all that blood.”14

One of the qualities that characterizes Ramirez as an “evil” person—as opposed to someone who has now and then done evil acts—is his lifelong inability to make a lasting and harmonious attachment to anyone. Unlike a number of the married serial killers who have led double lives—being thoughtful and attentive to their wives and families while brutal to their victims—Ramirez appeared to spend each of his waking hours in a state of hatred toward people in general, continually planning for his next sadistic act. In this respect he resembles the next person we will discuss, whose case is an example of (among other things) hypersexuality—the need, that is, for excessively frequent sexual release.

HYPERSEXUALITY

Leonard Fraser, born in 1951 in northern Australia, had been a compulsive liar and a loner from early childhood—a childhood that was punctuated by frequent tantrums and rages. In all fairness, his father aggravated Leonard's aggressive tendencies by beating his son “black and blue” with his belt—not realizing (as few parents do) that abusively punishing a fearless child who is utterly unresponsive to such treatment is absolutely ineffective and only makes a bad situation worse. Violent and destructive in school, Leonard was markedly hypersexual (heterosexual more than homosexual), defiant, and uncontrollable. The degree to which hypersexuality can be ascribed to heredity rather than to sexual overstimulation in the early years is not always an easy equation to solve. But in Leonard's case, at least, hypersexuality was evident even before he was subjected to forced sex by the bigger boys in the reformatory to which he was later sent. In turn, he raped the boys smaller than himself and, when released at seventeen, he set about raping women in large numbers.

Typical of serial killers, he also tortured animals, boiling cats alive. He abused alcohol and drugs, stole a car, and at one point raped and killed a French tourist. He went on in this way until he was arrested for rape when he was twenty-three. Sentenced to twenty-one years, he was nevertheless released after seven by a parole board that paid no attention to his having been diagnosed as a psychopath by the prison psychiatrists. Arrested again for rape right after his release, he was sentenced to only two months in jail. After a few more trips in and out of prison, he raped some sixteen women in an area around Brisbane and later raped, killed, and performed necrophilic acts on three more women and a nine-year-old girl. He continued to torture cats and also engaged in bestiality—sex with animals, in his case, with dogs. He kept a woman locked up in a room, insisting on having sex with her six times a day, before finally being arrested once again, this time diagnosed as an “incurable sexual sadist.” As a predator, Fraser performed acts that others call evil. He did so seemingly from morning till night, concentrating his efforts on waiflike women whom he would stalk and rape. The police characterized him as “alarmingly evil.”15

PERSONALITY DISORDERS

Of the various personality disorders in serial killers, psychopathy is arguably the most common. This disorder was present in 87 percent of 145 serial killers in my biographical records. Psychopathy is common as well in other persons who become known for evil actions (apart from serial sexual homicide), such as Charles Manson, who showed all the behavioral tendencies and the narcissistic personality traits in about equal measure. In such a crowded field it seems quite arbitrary to single out any one particular serial killer as the example for psychopathy. Serial killers in general are predators who, by their very nature, are indifferent to their victims and are self-centered to the utmost. These men are narcissistic at the least. Most go the extra mile and show the special traits of callousness, lack of remorse, glibness, and deceitfulness that put them at the outer edge of narcissism—that is, in the category of the psychopath. Perhaps it is their total lack of compassion for their victims that is their most important characteristic, even in those serial killers who, like Gary Ridgway or Herman Mudgett, led double lives and retained a measure of compassion for their wives.

PSYCHOPATHY

Paul Bernardo grew up in an Ontario family. His mother was a frumpy and undemonstrative woman; his father, an ill-tempered man who was also a Peeping Tom. As a child, Paul was a teaser and a bully who, once in his teens, got involved in various scams and rip-offs to make money. Very much the braggart, he was cocky and, as he began to date girls, possessive. His mother informed him when he was about sixteen that her husband was not his biological father. After this revelation about being a “half-adoptee,” he turned abusive and rebellious toward his mother. He developed into a con artist and supersalesman of no mean aptitude. A string of girlfriends followed. Paul was jealous and abusive, calling one girl a whore and beating her savagely because she'd gone to a bar with a girlfriend. To another girl he made obscene phone calls and was slapped with a restraining order. He became obsessed with rape, anal sex, and power fantasies.16 A man without scruples or morals, he became all the more immersed in get-rich-quick schemes, relying on his considerable charm.

At twenty-three, he met Karla Homolka, whom he mesmerized to the point of making her his willing sexual slave and eventually his wife. After the flowers and candy came the bondage and the criticisms of her being “ugly”—all with the effect of subjugating her to his will.17 Ultimately Paul engaged in many acts of voyeurism, pedophilia, kidnap, and murder and was responsible for the deaths of three women.

His first victim was his sister-in-law, Tammy. Paul convinced Karla, who worked in a veterinarian facility, to anesthetize her fifteen-year-old sister so Paul could have sex with her. Upon awakening, Tammy vomited and aspirated some of the stomach contents into her lungs—and died. This was not planned, but Paul and Karla made it seem accidental, so they were not charged with any crime. Paul did rape and murder two young women, however, around the time that he and Karla married in 1991.

To exert maximal control over Karla, Paul made videotapes of her in sexually compromising situations to use as blackmail, should she ever feel like squealing on her husband. Finally he went a bit too far, punching Karla and giving her two black eyes. She turned state's evidence, and Paul was sent to prison for life without parole. She herself was given a lengthy sentence but was released in 2006. As for Paul's sadistic traits (with which psychopathy in serial killers is often mingled), one story tells all: Karla had a pet iguana, which bit Paul when he incautiously put his hand in its cage. For “retribution” Paul cut its head off and made Karla cook the iguana and eat it.

George Schaefer was a psychopathic serial killer who was less outwardly charming than Paul Bernardo and whose sadistic traits were, if anything, even more repugnant. He was raised in an upper-class family in the South. His father was alcoholic and abusive toward his wife, at times beating her and calling her a whore. George was tormented during his teens by violent sexual fantasies. His attitudes toward sex swung wildly between craving it and vilifying girls who wore revealing clothes—condemning them as “sluts.” He became a deputy cop, and in that guise lured women by pretending they had committed a driving offense, then handcuffing, raping, and strangling them. His “signature” act was to frighten the women to such an extent that they would lose control of their bowels. Handsome and charming, but also hypersexual and ghoulish, he boasted of killing over eighty women, though the actual number remains uncertain. Once arrested and imprisoned, he penned stories of his crimes (either actual crimes or ones he aspired to), adding nauseating and sadistic details. Considered an “organized” type of serial killer by the venerated former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, Schaefer was depicted as one of the most evil and sadistic.18 Schaefer, while serving his life sentence, was killed by another inmate in 1995.

SCHIZOID PERSONALITY

The hallmark of a schizoid personality is aloofness. Unlike avoidant persons, who simultaneously crave connectedness with others yet are too fearful to reach out for it, schizoid persons are predominantly hermit-like and live as loners—unattached and not keen on becoming intimate with others. There are some types that don't fall into either of these categories: loners who do experience loneliness and like the idea of being close with someone yet run from such relationships, fearing they would not be accepted. Or, perhaps they lack the social skills to keep a relationship going. Among serial killers this personality type is unusually common: about half the men are schizoid or at best loners with mostly schizoid traits, though some of them do yearn for an attachment they are psychologically unable to negotiate.

Another prominent quality of schizoid persons is a kind of eerie detachment. This is made worse over the years because of the lack of “feedback” from exchanges with other people, which leaves the schizoid person more enveloped in his own world, increasingly more strange or peculiar. Among serial killers, some of the most gruesome murders are committed by the schizoid killer, who can mutilate and carve up bodies with no disturbance of emotion, much as though he were a child whittling wood or taking apart a clock to see what's inside. It is this detachment, side by side with the bodily mutilation, that unfailingly elicits the reaction of “evil” in ordinary people. The fact that the killer may not have been cruel in his interactions with coworkers and acquaintances does not change that label. Under the umbrella of schizoid personality we find serial killers who—apart from their murders—seem decent, even likable. Yet we find others who are habitually cruel, outlandishly so, arousing in us no feeling of their being “human” at all: men whom people formerly, and more delicately, called “sports of nature”—who might now be considered freaks or mutants.

Dennis Nilsen is an example of a schizoid man who nevertheless was tormented by loneliness and hungered for closeness. He is as well known in England as Jeffrey Dahmer is in America, and for the same reason: both were lonely, schizoid men, homosexual, unable to form lasting attachments but hoping against hope to create fantasied (and necessarily short-term) friendships with men whom they then strangled and preserved for as long as they could within their apartments. The corpses, albeit no longer available for conversation, were at least guaranteed of “being there” for a while as companions for these lonely loners. They were also available for necrophilic sex, for however many days it took before the bodies became rank.

Dennis was the son of an English woman—a distant relative of the famous novelist Virginia Woolf—and a Norwegian soldier who had served in World War II. Theirs was a stormy marriage that ended when Dennis was four. The one relative he was close to was his maternal grandfather, and he was sent to live with him after his parents divorced. The grandfather died when Dennis was six, after which he felt bereft and alone in the world. Unlike many serial killers, he enjoyed pets and owned both a dog and a cat. He never suffered abuse of any kind and later held responsible jobs. He served for eleven years in the British Army where he learned to cook; later he served briefly as a police officer. In his early thirties, back in London, he fell into the habit of picking up men in bars, some gay, others not, and inviting them back to his apartment. Before developing this routine, however, Dennis had had a roommate, David Gallichan, with whom he lived for about two years in what was apparently a nonsexual relationship. When they parted ways, Dennis began to drink to excess, felt unbearably lonely—and went to bars to pick up men.

Dennis committed his first murder in 1978, when he was thirty-three. After strangling his invited guest, he kept the body for a time under the floorboards of his flat. For a time, he would pry up the floorboards and have sex with the corpse—until the body was in too great a state of decomposition and had to be disposed of. Altogether, Nilsen killed fifteen men, though there were others he released unharmed. It was when, in 1983, he tried to dismember his current victim and flush some of the remains down the toilet, that the plumbing got stopped up and neighbors complained of bad odors. When the authorities came to look into the matter, he confessed in detail and made no plea for compassion, nor did he show remorse.19

At trial he was evaluated by psychiatrists from both the defense and prosecution sides. The defense concluded that Nilsen had an impaired sense of identity and was able to depersonalize to the point where he felt hardly anything about his murderous activities (this depersonalization is akin to the extreme detachment mentioned above). The prosecution asserted that he had a “mental abnormality,” though not a “mental disorder”20—perhaps a distinction without a difference. Be that as it may, he was clearly not psychotic. A distinguishing feature of Nilsen, compared with the majority of other serial killers, is that he did not seem dominated psychically by hatred. This is not to say that there wasn't any deeper skein in his psyche, somewhere beneath ready availability to consciousness, where hatred resided. Perhaps he felt hatred toward his mother, whose attention was diverted elsewhere when she remarried and had other children, or hatred toward the father who left the family after a few years of an alcohol-fueled stormy marriage.

Nilsen seemed curiously attached, if one can speak of such a thing, to the men-made-into-corpses whom he invited home. Were they symbolically connected with the beloved but now dead grandfather? Probably, but we cannot know. He does not strike us, at all events, as the typical serial killer, suffused with hatred for the family members of whom his victims were the unwitting representatives. Nilsen bore no animosity toward his victims. Another oddity about Nilsen: he was remarkably intelligent and even self-reflective. This came through in a letter he sent me when I had requested permission from him for a face-to-face interview. This is what he wrote:

Dear Michael: Thank you for your letter dated October 24 which I received yesterday [on All Soul's Day]…on Halloween—this inappropriate meeting of magic and superstition with science and knowledge. I see your letter is replete with stock phrases from the True Crime genre: “genesis of various violent crimes,” “the origins of criminal behavior”…I think when one begins to pre-package humanity into neat dark boxes indelibly labeled “criminal” and “murderer”…then you begin to stray from knowing the full picture of dysfunction as being a primarily human one…a dysfunction that precedes any artificiality of the deflecting label.

He went on to tell me that he was willing nonetheless to meet with me, but that the authorities where he is incarcerated would not permit this. (Nilsen was sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years.) Unbeknownst to Nilsen, the letter he received was a stock letter sent him by an agency helping me to set up possible interviews; it was not written by me, personally. I am in total agreement with him about how such phrases tend to rob the recipient of the humanity he surely possesses, regardless of his criminal acts. That is, of course, doubly true of such a sentient and reflective person as Nilsen is—in spite of all that he has done.

Edmund Emil Kemper III stands in stark contrast to Dennis Nilsen. Like Ramirez and Kallinger, hatred was the driving force behind Kemper's serial murders. A giant when he reached his adult height of six foot nine (206 cm), at the age of fifteen Kemper had already shot both his paternal grandparents to death—with a gun the grandfather had given him as a present. His response to the “why” question when he was interrogated: “I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma and Grandpa.”21 Kemper had already killed a cat by burying it alive, when he was just ten. At thirteen he shot a boy's dog to death and beheaded another cat. Between 1972 and 1973 Kemper picked up hitchhiking college girls in the Santa Cruz area in California; he would stab or shoot them, then dismember the bodies after conveying them to his apartment—where he would have sex with the dismembered corpses. He later dispatched his extremely abusive and domineering mother (the prime source of his hatred) in a similar fashion, with the added touch of using her severed head as a dartboard. Kemper, currently serving a life sentence, is on record as having mused: “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things: One part of me wants to take her home, be real nice and treat her right; the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick.”22

Kemper was clearly a schizoid psychopath, but there is one similarity with Nilsen: neither was able to form a sustained intimate relationship with anyone. This led Kemper to comment that women, while alive, were unavailable to him, whereas dead they were “his.”23 It may say something about his inability to inspire warm sentiments in others to add that my late cousin, Dr. Bruce Danto, a forensic psychiatrist in California, once interviewed Kemper and had come away with the feeling that, albeit vigorously opposed to the death penalty in general, he would have had no hesitation in “pulling the switch” on Kemper.

SADISTIC PERSONALITY

In some respects the Gradations of Evil scale could be reinterpreted as a Gradations of Sadism scale. The crimes and offenses that are the most likely to earn the label of “evil” are also the ones where sadistic traits are the most pervasive. If we look just at the men in my true-crime biographies (who are more likely to be sadistic than the women), 70 percent of male murderers are sadistic.24 But the higher one goes on the scale, the higher the percentage of men who are sadistic: in Categories 2 through 11, 25 percent are sadistic, but in the large remainder (12 through 22) 70 percent are sadistic. Limiting the search to the last four categories (19–22) all 81 are sadistic. The great majority in the higher categories (16 or higher) are also psychopathic at the same time, so the phrase “sadistic psychopath” would be an accurate characterization of these men: serial killers making up the largest group.

Some of the sadistic traits are stronger indicators than others. Enjoying the suffering of others is the key trait, but lying (deceiving) to others in order to inflict pain (tricking the victim into going to some remote or secret place where the sadist can do his work without detection) is another important trait. A third important quality is the intimidation of others by threats and cruelty. There are several serial killers whose obsession with torture—prolonged torture, at that—is so pronounced that the word evil would spring to the lips of just about everyone who heard what these men had inflicted on their victims.

It so happens that some of the torturers have committed acts the full extent of which even the police and crime scene investigators can't fully discover. The children whom David Paul Brown (aka Nathaniel Bar-Jonah) is suspected of torturing, for example, have simply disappeared but for a few bone fragments underneath his apartment. Had they been tortured just a bit? For hours or days? Hardly at all? We will never know. So his place along the scale is uncertain. But there are other serial killers who not only reveled in torturing their victims, but were also compulsive record keepers of their repugnant deeds—deeds that struck the public as fiendish beyond anyone's worst nightmare or exercise of imagination. Such men serve as examples of the worst of the worst—and it has now become obvious to me, having looked at the records of over seventy such men, that had I known when I first created the scale in the late 1980s what I know now, I would have extended it to a few still-higher levels.

As I expressed in chapter 1, I had also wondered whether such men perhaps didn't exist in Dante's time—is there something new under the sun, after all? Or did Dante know of such men but then blushed at the thought of shocking his readers with such gruesome details, for which his elegant poetry would scarcely seem the proper vehicle? What follows are a few examples of “sadistic personality” of such a nature that I cannot convey to you their enormity without apologizing in advance for putting such material on the printed page. But my pen stops well short of putting the full horror of these men's sadism before your view in the same way that soldiers returning from the front lines who have seen mutilation share their memories either not at all or only with other veterans—and then only on rare occasions and in hushed tones.

David Parker Ray appears to be the most cruel and sadistic of all the serial killers, indeed, of all the murderers I have known or studied. I say “appears” because there could be another sadistic killer somewhere who tortured his victims even more than Ray did, but who left no records of his crimes. Of Ray we can once again paraphrase Dr. Simon's book title,25 “Bad men do what good men dream.” David Ray did what the Marquis de Sade only dreamed of. Dr. Simon, a distinguished forensic psychiatrist, knows full well what psychiatrists in general know: many people (men much more so than women) from time to time, especially after suffering insults, rejections, reverses, assaults, and the like, do have moments of murderous fantasies. The mental images may even include torture of those who have wronged or hurt them. This is what Dr. Simon meant by his book title. You may consider this a deplorable aspect of human nature, but it is a part of human nature all the same. But here is the important point: the vast majority of us—probably 97 percent of men and 99 percent of women—never assault, let alone torture anyone. Is this because the rest of us are so free of “impure” and murderous thoughts? Hardly. It is because most of us, besides having better genetic underpinnings, have had the good fortune to be well socialized by caring and nurturing parents or by other benevolent interactions with those close to us, with the result that we are more predisposed to love than to hatred. Likewise, our brains have more reliable mechanisms in place that instruct us: “But of course you must not do any of those nasty, retaliatory things you were thinking of!” And we don't. Even the Marquis de Sade didn't, though he committed some cruel acts (but no murders) in his younger days. His reputation is built mostly around his sadistic (I don't know what else to call them) fantasies, which he consecrated voluminously to paper (my editions run to about three thousand pages) but never carried out on a person. But to return to David Parker Ray…

Ray was a mechanic of uncommon skills, a superlative draftsman, a meticulous recorder of his fantasies, and a diabolically clever inventor of torture devices. Ray was no less clever in the methods of escaping justice. And like the notorious Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, Ray was able to live as two persons in one: a Jekyll and Hyde who could be sociable and pleasant to coworkers and to his children (though not so much to his wives), then switching in an instant into a callous executioner, experiencing a greater high or adrenaline rush from torture than the addict's high from cocaine (which Ray never used).

Ray was born in rural New Mexico in 1939 some thirty miles southeast of Albuquerque. Below is a sketch of his family tree. Cecil, Ray's father, was an alcoholic with a violent temper, of whom a childhood friend of Ray's said, “I heard some things about [Ray's] dad, but I don't want to repeat them.”26 Ray's parents divorced when he was ten, at which point Nettie, his mother, sent him and his sister, Peggy, to live with their paternal grandparents. The grandfather was a strict disciplinarian who insisted on a dress code for David that got him mocked by his more casual classmates. David and Peggy almost never saw their father, and their mother seldom visited. David was known as a loner. When he was about thirteen, bondage fantasies began percolating through his brain, and it was not long before he put them into action—tying a woman to a tree while he was in his midteens and torturing her to death.27 It is characteristic of men who become serial killers that they relish the sense of godlike power over others, the moment of a victim's death establishing as “factual” this power. This can go a long way to paper over what are usually shameful feelings of worthlessness and inferiority in the pre-murderous phase of the killer's personal life. The “serial” part can best be understood as stemming from the addiction to this morbidly fulfilling “high”—where the petite morte (as the French sometimes call an orgasm: the little death!) comes at the moment of someone else's grande morte. Lust and addiction by definition are acts that must be repeated—calmness, buildup of the craving to the tipping point, satisfaction of the craving, calm—in an endless cycle. Once the brain becomes wired for this cycle, it is like flowers pressed in Lucite—stamped eternally and unmodifiable.

images

Figure 7.1

A meager performer academically, Ray soon showed a remarkable talent for mechanical things. Outwardly, he came across as a pleasant, affable man; he went from one job to another over the years but acquitted himself well at each: gas station attendant, railroad-track repairer, and, in the later years, park ranger in a town south of Albuquerque called (after the old radio show) Truth Or Consequences (original name: Hot Springs). It is not clear when precisely he turned “professional” as a sadist, but by the early 1990s he had already begun building a torture chamber consisting of a double-wide mobile home situated in nearby, and very isolated, Elephant Butte, close to the lake of the same name. Ray outfitted the large trailer—which he dubbed, with his morbid humor, the Toy Box—with all manner of soundproofing, pulleys, chains, gynecological devices, nail-encrusted dildoes, bondage and stretching devices, stun-guns, cameras and TV monitors, cattle prods, syringes, chemicals, and fortified walls and doors. Ray's macabre paraphernalia were every bit as horrifying as the worst contraptions of the Spanish Inquisition, Hitler's death camps, and Moscow's Lyubyanka prison—the difference being merely one of focus. Ray's primary interest was not in breaking bones, burning, or cutting, but in tortures that concentrated on the organs of sex.

For much of his adult life and apparently even in his teens, Ray's bondage fantasies grew increasingly grotesque, until, in his thirties, he could reach orgasm only by masturbating with the fantasy of murdering a woman. In his forties he began kidnapping and torturing women, subjecting them to painful and degrading sex, with the emphasis on anal sex so typical of sexual sadists of heterosexual orientation—as with Paul Bernardo, mentioned above.

By 1993 he had created what he called an Introductory Tape—a lengthy commentary and description (sixteen pages, single-spaced when transcribed) that his victims were forced to listen to right after they had been lured from bars back to Ray's “home,” thrust into the Toy Box, and immobilized—suspended from the ceiling via the pulleys and chains.

We do not know how many years Ray operated as a professional sadist, nor how many victims he ultimately killed and disposed of. Because he was so shrewd at eliminating all evidence of bodily remains—either in the abundant New Mexico desert or in Elephant Butte Lake—no bodies were ever located. His accomplice and fiancée, Cindy Hendy, estimated that Ray had killed over a dozen, perhaps several dozen women following their torture—but she can give no accurate estimate.28

In writing this book about evil I was aware from the outset that the most convincing examples of evil acts would be the ones hardest to convey to the reader, without descending to the pornographic and the sensational. It may be, of course, that I am simply preaching to the converted and that you already agree with me that evil is the appropriate word to use when we hear of, say, the child murders of Royce Zeigler and Zein Isa or the depravity of Jeff Lundgren. But if you remain uncomfortable with the concept of evil as presented thus far and would say “amen” only upon hearing—or seeing—the torture evidence of David Parker Ray, then I am handicapped. I cannot show you the worst of Ray's hideous but artistically crafted drawings. I cannot reprint here more than a few sentences of the Introductory Tape. I can share with you my own experience when trying to read the transcription of the tape: Though I have been studying murderers and their personalities for over twenty years, I could not bring myself to read past the first of its sixteen pages. When I told this to a close friend—a preeminent psychiatrist and former chairman of a prestigious psychiatry department—he said: “Oh, c'mon, Stone, you have to be kidding.” But when he started reading, though he did get through most of it, he readily understood my reluctance. Just as hearing (or reading) Ray's words makes one want to turn away, viewing the Toy Box makes one want to look away so as not to dwell beyond one's tolerance upon the suffering Ray's victims had to endure. When a local locksmith, Bill King, was summoned after the arrest to open up the Toy Box, this was his reaction: “I could feel an evil presence in there. It was like something floating in the air, and I didn't want to be there. I'd seen enough.”29 In a like vein, several TV shows reporting on the case titled their programs The Evil in Elephant Butte.30 Here is a brief excerpt from the Introductory Tape:

My lady friend and I have been keeping sex slaves for years. We both have kinky hang-ups involving rape, dungeon-games, etc…. Our fetishes and hang-ups include stringent bondage, a little sadism…. You're gonna be here a month or two, or maybe three, if you keep us turned on. If it's up to my lady, we'd keep you indefinitely. She says it's just as much fun and less risky. But personally I like variety.31

Reading this brief excerpt, as uncomfortable as it is, can in no way compare to the emotions of a woman immobilized, limbs bound tightly, mouth covered with duct tape, her body hoisted by chains toward the ceiling of the Toy Box, a captive audience to Ray's voice coming from a loudspeaker—announcing what is about to happen to her.

In the dossier accumulated on Ray after his arrest is a file titled “Copies of Drawings Illustrating Women Being Subjected to Sexual Torture,” which runs to forty-seven pages.32 In the least repellent of these pictures, none of which will be shown here, a woman is portrayed tied to a table, bound by a variety of tightening winches and chains, in preparation for electric shocks and whatever other tortures Ray and his accomplice were in the mood for. Oddly, the picture is not pornographic in the sense of arousing one sexually—unless one happens to be a sexual sadist. Instead the picture is at once sickening and clinical—a measure of Ray's utter detachment from the suffering of which his “blueprint” is the harbinger. How can we begin to understand the origins of sexual sadism in men like David Parker Ray or Robert Berdella, Leonard Lake, and Dennis Rader?33

All we know at this time is that there are many factors that play a role, some more common and perhaps more significant than others: genetic risk for psychopathy (and certain of its components like thrill seeking and callousness or lack of compassion), parental brutality, father absence, maternal neglect, sexual molestation, low socioeconomic status, mental illness, and so on.34 But there is no factor that is present across the board in all sexual sadists, and no “crucial” factor without which one never sees sexual sadism. That is, no analogy can be made with the tuberculosis bacillus without which one doesn't get TB. A better analogy is to Persian carpets. Each is made of interwoven strands of different color and thickness (these are the various “factors”), each ends up a Persian rug—but no two are the same; each has its own pattern of colors and shapes. Some are quite similar; they are woven in the same city: Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, and experts can tell which city they came from. In Ray's case, he had a violent father who abandoned the family, a mother who left him in the care of grandparents and saw little of him afterward. There is no suggestion of sexual molestation, yet in his early teens he was already obsessed with bondage and divided the world of women into ladies and whores, the latter as disposable after use as dinner napkins.

Leonard Lake, whom we will discuss a bit further on, was abandoned by his mother when he was a toddler. Robert Berdella had a violent and abusive father. Dennis Rader, whom most know as “BTK,” came from a rather normal middle-class home where his mother occasionally spanked him on his backside for naughtiness—which seems to have stirred up sexual excitement. How many millions of boys experienced a similar life at home, or worse, and never became violent, let alone sexual sadists?

I think of a patient I once treated years ago who came from the same town as Jeffrey Dahmer. My patient had been sodomized by his father when he was nine; his older brother used to throw lit matches at him and force his hand onto a hot radiator. He grew up to be a loner: angry, embittered, suspicious, but also a gifted student of languages who hated most people but never laid a hand on anyone. Dahmer's father was a kindly man who did not abuse his son sexually or otherwise; the family was better off economically than was my patient's family. Dahmer's mother seems not to have been very available emotionally. My patient had more “reasons” to be a violent person; Dahmer had fewer of the popular “reasons.” Genetic factors probably account for much of the difference—and I will say more about this in the chapter on neuroscience—but these are as yet too ill defined or else hard to detect for us to be able to claim in advance: this man is going to be a sadist or a serial killer (or whatever else we are looking for). In any case, the genetic factors account for no more than a tendency, a predisposition that can either be muted by a protective environment later on or else brought to the point of aggressive outbursts by exposure to a harsh environment. We can be fairly certain, at all events, that once the pattern of excitement through sexual cruelty got established in Ray during his teens, the pattern became fixed. There was no going back.

PARENTAL ACTS OF OMISSION AND COMMISSION

What turns that innocent baby boy in the obstetrics ward into a serial killer? Many people seek the answer in bad family circumstances, as if those alone can account for such a drastic detour from the normal path of development. There are two main reasons for this tempting but not very accurate conclusion. First of all, it is rare to find a serial killer who was raised in a family that was even a close approximation of “normal.” A family, that is, where mother and father remained together as a harmonious couple, gentle and devoted to their children—whose punishment for “naughtiness” was mild, effective, and fair. Secondly, the departure from this ideal, in the families of serial killers, was often radical—so destructive as to cry out for intervention by the Child Protective Services. A more realistic view would give heredity its due, since any coherent explanation of serial killing lies in the interaction of circumstances both before and after birth. Admittedly, the worse the family environment, the harder it is to see what (if any) genetic factors or problems during pregnancy may also have played a role. This is because a horrific environment can lead all by itself to future violence, including the extreme kinds of violence that we label as evil. This may paper over, as it were, whatever unfavorable prebirth influences that may lie hidden underneath. We will look more closely at these interactions in the chapter on neuroscience, but for now, we will examine four different destructive family influences, using vignettes of serial killers whose early lives were marred by one of these four factors.

Parental Cruelty

James Mitchell (“Mike”) DeBardeleben is one of the schizoid psychopaths who swell the ranks of serial killers.35 He was the middle child in an upper-middle-class family. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the army and was known for his punitiveness toward his sons. When Mike was five, for example, his father would thrust his head underwater as a punishment for various childhood peccadilloes. He also beat Mike on many occasions.36 His mother was a chronic alcoholic, at times violent in her punishment of Mike for his stubbornness.37 She was promiscuous, picking up men in bars, especially when her husband was stationed away. Mike was the most rebellious of the children and thus drew the most fire from his parents.

In DeBardeleben's case, parental cruelty (coupled with his mother's promiscuity) merged with what is almost certainly a genetic tendency to psychopathy, as suggested by his rebelliousness.38 His brother, Ralph, with what may have been a different set of genetic givens, later committed suicide.

Like David Parker Ray, DeBardeleben aspired to create a torture chamber (though he never carried this out). Unlike Ray, he did not have a pleasant social exterior. At his very best, Mike was mean, nasty, and brutal toward his five wives—blackmailing some with pornographic pictures he had them pose for, so they would be too afraid to expose him. He was unspeakably cruel to the twenty or so victims of his serial murders—some of whom he tortured to the point where (as he recorded on tape) they pleaded with him to either stop or kill them.39 True-crime writer Stephen Michaud saw DeBardeleben not only lacking in the merest trace of decency toward anyone, but “so evil, so unspeakably bad” that he found it difficult to tell his story: “It was too bloody horrible, sustained horror.”40

DeBardeleben's hatred—demonization would be a better word—of women surely stemmed from his hatred of his mother. He viewed women as whores and sluts, worthy only of being reduced to nullities via rape and murder. In the classification of sexual sadists developed by former FBI profiler, Roy Hazelwood, DeBardeleben was of the “anger-excitation” type that punishes women for supposedly being “evil” and “powerful.” Men of this stripe are animated by the urge to eliminate that power.41 Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, also hated his seductive and punitive mother; both he and DeBardeleben can be understood as committing “serial matricide”: killing, symbolically, their mothers over and over again. DeBardeleben was much crueler than Ridgway, becoming in his eighteen-year-long career of serial murder a black hole of narcissism, sucking in and destroying any woman who came near. For all that, DeBardeleben was curiously more “philosophic”—if one dare apply that word to a serial killer—in that he penned a psychologically accurate account of what sadism is all about:

The central impulse [of sadism] is to have complete mastery over another person—to make her the helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god…and the most radical aim is to make her suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her.42

Given that purposely causing intense suffering is the heart of what evil is all about, DeBardeleben comes across as a kind of high priest and spokesman among the practitioners of evil. And since serial killers commit the acts we define as evil—routinely and habitually—it is not surprising that evil's high priest should arise from within the ranks of serial killers, rather than the ranks of those who dip into evil just once or twice in their lives, like the wife killers and mass murderers.

Parental Neglect

Since a third of serial killers experienced parental neglect, there are many examples to choose from to demonstrate its effect. Neglect by the mother is more damaging in the first few years of life than neglect by the father, though father absence becomes a serious matter in the lives of boys in their preteen and teenage years.43 To grow up without a mother's love and without any compensating maternal influences from other sources altogether will tend to rob the child of the qualities we lump together as “human.” A boy in these circumstances is at risk to grow up like one of Harry Harlow's monkeys—the ones raised next to a substitute “monkey” made of wire rather than one made of cloth.44 The monkeys with the wire mothers were deficient in every social and sexual sphere. Maternally deprived boys and girls grow up handicapped in the same ways. As for the boys, many tend to be filled with envy and hatred of normal people. If they are, in addition, beaten by foster parents or other caretakers, they are more likely than others to lash out violently and to treat other people as though they are no more than inanimate objects to be smashed or carved up at will.

Leonard Lake was a California man born in 1945 to Elgin and Gloria Lake. Elgin abandoned the family after the birth of Leonard's younger brother. Gloria later tried to reunite with him, taking along the two younger children and leaving Leonard in the care of her parents. He was never reunited with his mother even after she divorced and remarried when Leonard was nine.45 What contact he did have with his mother was far from perfect: she encouraged him to take nude photos of girls, including his sister and cousins—as if to develop pride in the body—but with the effect of his developing instead a preoccupation with pornography and, later, a penchant for having sex with his sister. Like David Parker Ray, he was intact enough to sandwich in two marriages before he teamed up with an illegal immigrant, Charles Ng, to create a torture-bunker in a remote area, where they captured and tortured some two dozen people (mostly women), reducing their remains to ashes in an adjoining crematorium. Of some of their victims they made “snuff films”—films that depict the victim's murder. Lake's second marriage went aground when his wife discovered he been making amateur pornographic films featuring bondage acts.46 Lake was devastated for a time after the divorce, yet he then felt free to do anything he wanted, commenting, “Society is powerless against one who is not afraid to die.” What makes Lake noteworthy, placing him, along with Ray and DeBardeleben, at the end of the Gradations scale, was his compulsive diary keeping, where his extreme acts of sadism were faithfully recorded for posterity. Like the monkey reared with the wire mother, Lake couldn't make normal connections. He spoke of his envy of beautiful women and rich men who always end up getting the best of life and of whom Lake said, “I live to correct this.”47 As for Lake's participation in evil, this is best grasped by viewing one of his filmed scenes. He and Ng captured a young mother, Brenda O'Connor. They had already killed her baby, but she didn't know this. When she begged for her baby, Lake engaged in the following dialogue:

Lake: Brenda, you have a choice. We'll give it to you right now.

Brenda: What?

Lake: You can cooperate with us…that means you will stay here as our prisoner. You will work for us, you will wash for us, you will fuck for us. Or you can say, “No, I don't want to do that,” in which case we'll tie you to the bed, we'll rape you, and then we'll take you outside and shoot you. Your choice.48

Later, when arrested—ironically, for theft, by a policeman who knew nothing of the torture-murders—Lake committed suicide, swallowing two cyanide pills. Looking back on the crimes of Lake and his younger accomplice, I feel compelled to add a footnote to my definition of evil. Beyond the world where we can say tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner—to understand all is to forgive all—lies a world where we can understand, but not forgive. The bondage and enslavement of Lake's women victims were Lake's antidote to the abandonment and neglect by his mother: Lake's women were immobilized and held captive. And taking a page from DeBardeleben, his torture of a woman showed that he had (godlike) power over them, rather than the woman/mother having power over Lake. But his fury at his mother's abandonment made him go the extra step and kill them. So much for my “psychoanalysis” of Leonard Lake. But what he did to these women takes him to a world where there is no forgiveness. When people speak of evil, this is the world they are talking about.

Parental Humiliation

About two serial killers out of three suffered humiliation from one or both parents. There are certain kinds of put-downs that are hard for young boys or adolescents to shake off, especially hurtful remarks about sexuality, lack of manliness, stupidity at school, or odd physical features (including being grossly overweight). Humiliation, if severe enough and prolonged, can create a vicious circle, undermining the boy's self-esteem, making him more hurt or more angry and argumentative with the overly critical parent, who retaliates by further humiliation, and so on. The serial killers who were humiliated usually endured other negative experiences as well, but sometimes this particular misery seemed to be the one that overshadowed all the others.

Gerald Gallego, for example, was raised by his mother and a stepfather; he never knew his birth father. Like many serial killers, bed-wetting was a problem for much longer than is usually the case—and for this he got taunted by his stepfather, who dubbed him “pissy-pants.” Of course there's more to the story with Gallego. It came out at his trial, after he was arrested for killing women and dumping them by the side of the road. Apparently his birth father had killed two policemen—and had dumped their bodies by the side of the road (for which the elder Gallego was executed).49 I'm sure there are no genes for dumping bodies by the side of the road—but the son may have inherited some genes (genes that relate to aggression, for example) that, when mixed with the humiliation, heightened the risk for violence.

Jerry Brudos, a serial killer of some dozen or more women in Oregon, liked to wear his mother's shoes when he was a boy of five.50 A strict, puritanical woman, she grabbed and destroyed the shoes, shaming him that what he had done was “wicked.”51 But a pattern got established, no doubt fixed for all time, by his mother's making such an issue of his boyhood experimentation. By his teen years, he was collecting and hiding shoes and women's underwear; touching these articles of clothing was both soothing and sexually exciting. His activities passed a line in the sand when he was seventeen: he became violent, demanding at knifepoint that a girl of his age strip naked. When caught, he was sent for a psychiatric evaluation; the conclusion was that he had a hatred toward his mother, which then gave rise to a thirst for revenge against women in general. In his late twenties he progressed to serial sexual murders, violating the bodies of his victims usually after they were dead, not only having sex with the corpses but in some instances removing a breast—and using it as a mold for a paperweight.

Brudos was a psychopath: utterly callous and without remorse, not all of which, I think, can be laid at his mother's doorstep. There are plenty of little boys whose mothers made them feel emasculated for trying on their shoes who never grow up to do the things that Jerry Brudos did. So he may have come into the world with some of the genetic low cards as well. As for the “no remorse” factor, a journalist once asked Brudos when he was languishing in prison for the serial murders, “Jerry, now that you've been here a while and can look back on your life, do you have any different thoughts about those women you killed?” Whereupon Brudos rolled up a little piece of paper into a wad, flicked it onto the floor, and said, “I care about those women as much as I care about that paper-wad.”

Parental Seduction

Not all serial killers had been seduced by a mother or sodomized by a father. Some were sexually molested in their early years by a foster parent. This kind of premature introduction to the sexual life often has the effect, through its overstimulation, of making the child both preoccupied with sex and “hypersexual.” A boy born with genetic risk for violence who is then exposed to such an erotically “turned-on” environment may steer his course toward sexual crimes rather than, say, embezzlement or bank robbing. I chose for my example here a man, Tommy Lynn Sells, I had interviewed on death row in Texas, not so much because he was one of the few who was seduced by a foster parent, but because he could talk about it with unusual candor. Most murderers and men on death row claim innocence and lie about their crimes, especially if the victim(s) were family members (think of Scott Peterson and his pregnant wife, Laci).52

Tommy Lynn Sells was born, along with his twin sister, Tammy Jean, in 1964 in California of uncertain paternity. They both came down with meningitis when they were a year and a half old; Tammy Jean died. His mother was poor and was overwhelmed with trying to care for the other children and sent Tommy to an aunt, but when he was about eight, he was sent to live with a man who gave him food and shelter—but at a price. The man was a pedophile and made Tommy give him oral sex.53 Sells did poorly in school, was mocked by the other students because he spoke differently and had fewer possessions than they did, but he learned to “level the playing field” through violence. He had to fend for himself in his teens and became a drifter, going from state to state (in the South mostly), doing crimes of theft to put food in his mouth and crimes of violence to get even with those he hated: the women who had abandoned him and the pedophile who seduced him. Even his mother shifted at times between seductiveness and rejection. Sells began murdering in his teens: first, men who crossed his path, but later on, women and even children. By the time he was caught, he had killed, according to his reckoning—whose accuracy is hard to verify—some seventy people. What led to his arrest was the attempted murder of a young girl whose throat he had slit after sneaking into the trailer where she and a friend were sleeping. The friend died, but the other girl was able to walk, bleeding profusely, to a neighbor, and also gave the police a description of her assailant.

Many of Sells's murders were horrific, including that of the Dardeen family in 1987 in Illinois. After being invited to a meal with the family, he shot the husband, beat the wife and their three-year-old son to death. During the beating, the pregnant wife spontaneously delivered a baby girl whom he also beat to death.54

Yet, Sells had the kind of charm that Ray and Lake also had: he married several times and had two children, in among all the slaughter.

When I had the opportunity to interview Sells on death row in Texas, my reaction—before I actually met him—was that I would like to kill him for all the atrocious rapes and murders he had committed. Death row interviews are always conducted in special cubicles where three inches of glass separate the visitor from the inmate. My opening comment was: “Well, Tommy, I guess they got these three inches of glass so I don't kill you and you don't kill me!” He laughed and said, with a broad Texan twang: “You got that rahht!” But then he told me with remarkable candor about the man who violated him when he was a boy of eight and nine, and about the hatred this (and everything else that had happened to him) filled his mind with ever after.55 Tommy spoke to me about the “adrenaline rush” he got when he slit the throat of a victim and saw the blood rushing out. “That settled down my anger for a couple weeks,” he told me, until, that is, the hatred built up again, and he craved another murderous “fix.” He was also forthright enough to acknowledge to me that were he to feel full remorse, instead of just a little bit, he'd have to go kill himself for all the terrible things he'd done. This was the voice of a conscience, however meager and beaten down. And within the vast desert of damage and depravity that surrounded his life, there was this oasis of humanity, miniature though it was, that allowed me to feel a measure of compassion for this man.

All but a few of the murderers I have interviewed in prisons and forensic hospitals have lied and denied—and in so doing, have earned a contempt that is by no means easily overcome. This does not mean that the public was wrong in considering the serial murders of Tommy Lynn Sells as “evil.” Far from it. It suggests, however, that in some people evil can coexist with a few human qualities one would scarcely imagine were there underneath. Sells has indicated that what launched him on his career as a murderer was his having witnessed, inadvertently, during the Peeping Tom days of his adolescence, a neighbor who had his son perform oral sex on him. This reminded him, so he told me, of his male caretaker of a few years before. But this may be a self-serving memory of dubious authenticity. So what earned my measure of compassion was not his honesty, for that was not unimpeachable; it was not his remorse, for that was meager. It was rather his candor about what had happened to him during his early years, and about the destructive (and ultimately self-destructive) path of vengeance he then pursued.

I am often asked by friends who knew I had been going around the country interviewing serial killers: Was I ever frightened, or even a bit anxious, as I faced these men? I was anxious, as it turned out, before the first such interview, wondering what it would be like to sit across from a man who had killed people by the dozen—and not even in combat or when ordered to partake in “ethnic cleansing” but in peacetime, and just because killing was what he liked to do. My first interview was with Arthur Shawcross, who had killed a dozen prostitutes in Rochester, New York. There were, of course, guards all around, and Arthur himself is disarmingly jovial. My anxiety quickly dissipated. By the time I interviewed Tommy Lynn Sells, I felt like an old hand at it and wasn't anxious at all. Not consciously anyway. But there must have been something about his “adrenaline rush” at slitting the throats of all those young girls that left its imprint on my brain despite my nonchalance during the interview, for that night I had the following dream:

I am in the reception room where a receiving line has formed to congratulate Hitler on his reelection to some office. Hitler is in military uniform, shaking everyone's hand as each one has his turn. It is 1954—nine years after Hitler's suicide, but I am not aware of this in the dream. I am about tenth in line, and as I approach, I feel ill at ease, thinking: Shake the hand of Hitler? I want to kill him! But would killing Hitler be a crime? Would it be murder? My mentor, Dr. Kernberg, is standing off to one side, so I go up to him and ask: “Otto, I feel I should kill Hitler. But would that be murder?” He ponders a moment, but then tells me: “Well, in the case of Hitler, no, it would not be murder; it would be all right.”

The meaning was pretty clear to me. My feelings toward Sells were very divided. It was as though he were two people scrunched together into one enormous person, as he had indeed become after years of prison-fare carbohydrates: one man who was disarmingly jovial, like Shawcross, but who could talk with candor about his past and about his deeds. And a second man, who inspired fear and loathing for the murders of all those women and children. Before I met him, I felt like killing him. After I met him, I felt respect for Sells—for his acknowledging openly what he had done, and for the small seeds of remorse that were beginning to sprout in this man. Confronting the half-human, half-demon “split-self” that Sells had become evoked the same sort of split in me: half-homicidally contemptuous, half-compassionate. Small wonder that I summoned Otto Kernberg as my adviser in the dream: When he was a boy, he had once seen Hitler during the first days of the 1938 Austrian Anschluss, and had then escaped with his family. And he went on to become the world's leading authority on the psychological defense mechanism of splitting, which takes place when we try to grapple with totally disparate, oil-and-water emotions, usually of love and hate, that we cannot comfortably integrate.

OTHER FACTORS

Among the many threads that make up the tapestry of serial murder, some are common, detectable in almost every case; others are rare yet very noticeable when present. In the closing sections of this chapter I will touch on several of the more important of these as-yet-unexamined threads.

Adoption

Adoptees make up about 2 percent of the population in the United States. The vast majority are adopted into homes with loving and devoted parents; the adopted children, however curious they may be about their birth parents, grow up as reasonably well-adjusted people, leading constructive, gratifying lives. But if we look at crime statistics, especially in the tiny arena of serial killers, the story is not so optimistic. The FBI, reporting on 500 serial killers, found that 16 percent had been adoptees.56 In my study of 145 serial killers, 15.8 percent were adoptees—basically the same conclusion.57

Being an adoptee can create problems in several ways. Since we're talking about serial killers here, I am focusing only on boys. The boy might, for example, resent having been given up by his birth mother, becoming, even though he is happy with his adoptive mother, an embittered, angry person. This was the case with David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam.” He had been adopted by middle-class parents who were loving, consistently there for him, and not at all abusive. A social misfit and loner, he went downhill after the death of his adoptive mother. In his teens he set fires and tortured animals. He pictured his birth mother as promiscuous and indifferent; he earned his celebrity status by shooting to death girls (and a few young men) who were making out in lovers’ lanes around town—equating the girls with the kind of promiscuous, unmotherly woman his birth mother seemed to have been. Since there are thousands of adopted boys in similar circumstances—who never commit crimes, let alone serial murder—there has to be something else wrong with this picture. Did Berkowitz have a violent birth father? Did the birth mother abuse alcohol in the first months of pregnancy? We don't know. But we are pretty sure his life after he was adopted did not contribute to his later violence.

Joel Rifkin, the serial killer of seventeen or so prostitutes in Long Island, was also raised by adoptive parents who were caring, devoted, and well-to-do.58 Here again, the less we can find wrong with his life once he was born, the more we have to assume there were troubles in the genes or in the mother's pregnancy. These factors we examine further in the chapter on neuroscience.

Charles Schmid presents a more complicated picture: adopted at birth, he was raised by parents who were generous and indulgent in the main, though his father and he got into frequent arguments and sometimes his father was physically abusive. Schmid was clearly psychopathic: charming, glib, grandiose, dishonest (to impress women he rigged a guitar with tapes of famous guitar players), and thrill seeking (he liked to do parachute jumps, not pulling the opening cord until the last second). So the evil, as defined by his serial murders, seemed to come from three parts nature and one part nurture. Perhaps more injurious than his father's beatings was the response of his birth mother after Schmid tracked her down during his adolescence. She said, “I didn't want you when you were born, and I don't want you now. Get out!”59

The situation with Gerald Stano was even more complicated and raises the question whether good adoptive parents can make up for truly horrendous circumstances that were limited to the first few months of life. Stano was adopted as a one-year-old (having been given up for adoption at six months) from a promiscuous, alcoholic mother who neglected him to such an extent that he was considered unadoptable by the doctors in upstate New York. The neglect was such that he was found eating his own feces in order to survive.60 Eugene Stano was the manager of a large corporation; his wife was a social worker. They were devoted parents who provided all the comforts of upper-middle-class life. But Gerald began stealing early on and progressed to worse behaviors later: he bribed schoolmates (with money he stole from his father) to let him win races so he would look successful in his parents’ eyes, he abused drugs, and was violent with women, including the wife he was briefly married to when he was twenty-four (in 1975). Well before that, he committed his first murder, when he was eighteen. Eleven years later he was in prison for the murders of forty-one women, though the total may have been even greater. He claimed to experience sexual arousal from the slow strangulation of his victims. Stano was executed in 1998 when he was forty-six. Raymond Neal, whose sister had been murdered by Stano, was present at the execution. For him, Stano was an evil man, a monster, and Neal felt relief when Stano was pronounced dead.61

There is a tendency in modern societies to view vengeance as a barbarity; ditto, the death penalty. These issues go beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that the desire for vengeance when one has been grievously wronged answers to something deep within us. This is illustrated beautifully in a recent article in the New Yorker about life among the tribes in New Guinea, the subtitle of which is, “What can tribal societies tell us about the need to get even?”62 The author argues persuasively that the “thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions,” adding (on the last page) that “[w]e grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of, and to transcend.” My only point here is that transcendence comes hard when your sister has been strangled by a serial killer.

Head Injury

One in four serial killers suffered during their early years either a head injury or (more rarely) a condition affecting the brain—such as meningitis or a very high fever. A good deal depends on just which part of the brain was damaged. But if the “right” regions were damaged, such damage could have serious consequences on self-control, on sizing up social situations correctly, tuning in to other people empathically, resonating with them compassionately, and so forth. The effects of such head injuries are hardly limited to serial killers but are important as precursors to crimes of all sorts. Usually when head injury is part of a killer's history, it is interwoven with other negative circumstances: having been beaten as a child (including on the head, as in the case of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas63), being mentally ill, or being at risk for psychopathic personality. But sometimes serious head injury seems to be the only background factor even in a serial killer.

Richard Starrett came from a well-to-do family in Georgia. The parents were good people and spared him the kind of physical or verbal abuse or the neglect that was part of the picture in the lives of so many other serial killers. He suffered a head injury when he was a toddler and an even more severe one when he was seven. On that occasion he had been hanging upside down on a jungle-gym in the playground and fell onto the asphalt, unconscious. His mother rushed him to the hospital, but doctors found nothing seriously wrong at that time.64 Shortly afterward, however, Starrett began to have headaches, dizzy spells, blackouts, and moments of collapsing. He loved animals yet became intrigued with sadistic magazines that emphasized bondage. He became a Peeping Tom in adolescence, and by the time he went to college, he was hearing internal voices and had headaches that were triggered by violence or sex magazines. Rather than finish college, he dropped out and went to California because of uncontrollable urges to stalk women. Yet he was able to marry when he was twenty-three and have a daughter, though he still suffered blackouts, headaches, and “absences.” Back in Georgia for a time, he had a love affair with another woman, but when she discovered he was married, “something happened.” He said he removed a gun from a drawer so she wouldn't see it—and it accidentally went off, killing her. Maybe. I think a betting man would put more money on murder. It was after that, at all events, that Starrett began to meet and overpower women for sex: he would then indulge in bondage and torture, killing about ten women before he was arrested. Now serving a life sentence, he himself figured his head injuries were the main reason he ended up with damaged brain function and an abnormal electroencephalogram, along with the paraphilia (as defined below) of bondage. All these led ultimately, in Starrett's case, to the serial murders. Starrett even felt remorse for his crimes, which is unusual in a serial killer. This suggests that he was not a psychopath—certainly not from birth—but rather someone whose behavior was shunted way out of line by brain damage in key areas. Which areas those are I will outline in detail in the chapter on neuroscience.

Paraphilias

Sexual urges directed at nonhuman objects (including animals) or the infliction of suffering and humiliation on a sexual partner or children are viewed together under the heading of “paraphilia.” In hearing about a person with a paraphilia (almost all such persons are men), the public may react with bewilderment or disgust if the paraphilia is not very harmful. The Peeping Tom (voyeurism) or the “flasher” (exhibitionism)—even the man who rubs against a woman on trains or subways (frotteurism) will seldom be called “evil.” Public opinion becomes much more severe where harm is involved or when the degree of depravity is extreme. Men who engage in or force sex on children (pedophilia), or who eat a victim's flesh (cannibalism), or who have sex with a corpse (necrophilia) are far more likely to be labeled evil by ordinary people or by the media. This goes double for men who rely on murder for sexual arousal (sexual sadism), which is the case with many serial killers: at least 30 percent. Tying up and immobilizing a victim (bondage) is often a prelude to the more harmful (and lethal) paraphilias, since once immobilized, the victim is under the total control of a man who is free to do exactly as he pleases.

Just how a man develops a paraphilia is not well understood. Both genes and family environment appear to play a role. The subject will be treated more fully in the chapter on neuroscience, but it does appear that many men with one or more paraphilias have either witnessed inappropriate sexual encounters during childhood, or were themselves sexually molested in some way. But this is not always the case: some men seem to be born with brain differences in certain areas that incline them to develop a paraphilia, even in the absence of childhood maltreatment. Sexual sadism in a man like Tommy Lynn Sells, who as a child was maltreated in every way we can imagine, is less surprising as an outcome. But that same paraphilia—the hallmark of serial killing—is quite surprising in a man whose childhood seems reasonably normal…and to that extent, all the more intriguing from the standpoint of a possible heredity factor.

Dennis Rader, who baffled the Kansas authorities for the better part of two decades when he embarked on his career as a serial killer, gave himself the nickname BTK—for bind-torture-kill.65 By the time he was finally caught, he had killed ten people. The long interval between the first murder and the arrest had partly to do with his cleverness and partly with his leading a double life—the other half of which was that of an ordinary married father of two, well dressed in a business suit, and president of his local church. His double life extended down to his being able to juggle sadistic sex with his victims and “vanilla” sex with his wife, who had no idea of his other self.

We know little about his early life, apart from the fact that when he was spanked by his mother, he used to have erections. Already by age eight or nine, he developed sadistic sexual fantasies, though in other respects his façade to the outside world was unremarkable. The progression from fantasy to paraphilia was not long in coming: he had a whole menu of paraphilias, most of them the dangerous ones. Besides dressing in women's clothes (transvestism—a nonharmful variety), there were also pedophilia, bondage, sexual sadism, and yet another, characterized by hanging oneself briefly so as to experience a stronger orgasm when masturbating (called “autoerotic asphyxiophilia”). As for the sexual sadism, during the Otero murders, which he committed at age twenty-nine in 1974, he had an orgasm when he killed the eleven-year-old Josie Otero, marking this as a distinctly a sexual crime. A hint that his perversions arose from genetic peculiarities (or possibly birth complications) is the fact that Rader had three brothers who are apparently normal. Because a complex personality trait depends on the interaction of many genes, and on their subsequent interaction with the environment, it is not to be expected that even relatives as close as his three brothers would develop the same abnormality.66

What is particularly chilling about Dennis Rader as a serial killer is this: here is a church president in (what looks like) a Brooks Brothers suit, well mannered, articulate, suave, forthright, telling the judge about strangling this or that woman with no more inflection in his voice than you or I would have were we to read to a friend a newspaper ad for lawn chairs or a travel clock. This is a man who took an intermission from murder so that, like any good dad, he could attend his kids’ athletic games.67 The point being: he was more like you or me than any other of the serial killers, meaning that—outwardly—we are not so different from Dennis Rader. Perhaps this is why Phil Kline, the attorney general, told people at Rader's trial: “In a few minutes you will look face-to-face with pure evil…. Victims whose voices were brutally silenced by the evil of one man.”68 In Rader's case, evil resides not only in what he did, but in the distance required for the rest of us to reassure ourselves that, well, at the end of the day, on the inside at least, we're not at all like Rader! Perhaps this kind of distancing helps account for the public's fascination with Ted Bundy, charming, handsome, smart—not so different from us. Whereas, when it comes to a ghoulish freak like Ed Gein or Richard Chase, “evil” appears to reside not just in the grotesqueness of their acts but in their bizarre thoughts and attire. We already feel pretty secure that we could never be like them. Their evil strikes us, comfortably, as totally “alien” to ourselves.

The Triad

As mentioned earlier, boys who set fires, torture animals, and wet the bed long past the age when other children gain bladder control are known to be at risk for behaving in violent ways as they grow older. Killing or torturing the kinds of animals that children usually cherish as pets—cats, dogs, and rabbits—is probably the key element here, since these animals are the closest, in the child's mind, to people. So it is not surprising that serial killers were much more likely, in their early days, to have tortured animals than were the men who killed their wives.69 Boys who are on the path to becoming serial killers and who have an underlying hatred of women will often resort to killing cats as a kind of rehearsal for murdering women. It is easy to see why, given that, apart from the ears, cats look like beautiful women in miniature: heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, big eyes, small nose, demure mouth, coy expression. Animal torture when combined with one of the dangerous paraphilias like bondage or sexual sadism makes for an even greater predictor of repeated sexual crimes. Men who kill their wives rarely show these types of predilection. It is for reasons of this sort that those who end up being called “evil” (as defined by the extreme of depravity and victim suffering that characterize their acts) are likely to have exhibited such destructive behaviors as bondage, fire setting, and animal torture. Within the realm of serial killers, this childhood “triad” is a significant tip-off to future violence against humans.70

Gary Ridgway, who was later to achieve notoriety as Washington State's Green River Killer, ultimately killed, by his own inexact reckoning, about seventy women. He targeted prostitutes, though some of his victims were not. Unlike most of the well-known serial killers whose IQs tend to be well above average, Gary's IQ was below normal (82), but this was no impediment to his career as a serial killer—a career that spanned as many years as that of Dennis Rader. Gary's mother was apparently very attractive—but equally cruel. When he wet his bed, his mother would parade him naked in front of his two half-brothers and make him stand in a tub of cold water, while she herself was half-naked, staring at his genitals.71 His mother's alternating cruelty and seductiveness got transformed in Gary's mind into violent fantasies of killing her and, later, other women with a knife. During his teen years he killed cats and birds and also set fires. Gary began his serial killing in earnest after he learned that his first wife had cheated on him—which made her into a “whore” in his mind. Though psychopathic, he could be a friendly and helpful neighbor. Gary read the Bible, went to church, and encouraged neighbors to take God more fully into their lives.72

He seemed genuinely in love with Judith, his third wife. I happened to meet Judith when she and I were guests on the Montel Williams TV show in 2007 (and Gary was already in prison). She told the audience that during the years they were together, the frequency of his killing declined appreciably, as though he were finally happy enough, once he was with a good woman, that the destructive urge was no longer so strong. Of course, she only learned this after Gary's arrest. During their marriage, she knew nothing of his secret activities. When first arrested and interviewed by the police and by the FBI, Gary was for the most part amiable and calm. But when asked why he dumped by the river the bodies of the women he strangled, he suddenly grew angry and said, “The women were garbage!” The general feeling was that Gary had been committing a kind of serial matricide, killing his sexy but hated mother again and again.73

Substance Abuse

Abuse of alcohol or other drugs is common in serial killers: almost half (45 percent) drank alcohol to excess, and another 7 percent used other drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, or methamphetamine. The larger group that abused alcohol could be divided into a somewhat bigger half (of men that used alcohol exclusively) and a smaller group where the men relied on multiple substances: alcohol plus cocaine or LSD or whatever. But people who commit violent crimes (whether or not they reach the level of evil) often abuse drugs to work up the nerve, in many cases, to do what they're itching to do.74 This is true for serial killers as well. It would be no exaggeration to say that serial killers are addicted to serial killing the way cocaine addicts are addicted to cocaine. As we saw with Tommy Lynn Sells, murder gave him both sexual release and at the same time, release of the pent-up rage he felt against the world.

The ordinary and rhythmic build-up of sexual tension in men75—which in general demands release with greater urgency in men than in women—gets intertwined with the periodic need in serial killers to seek victims and to rape and kill them. And for a good half or more of them, alcohol (or whatever is the killer's drug of choice) is the fuel that gets the engine going. How alcohol affects the brain, acting as a catalyst to violence, will be shown in more detail in the chapter on neuroscience. The short explanation is that (as almost everyone has had a chance to witness at some time or other) alcohol (or cocaine or meth) lowers inhibition; the drugs take one's foot off the brakes, making it easier to do what one merely felt like doing before guzzling the beer or the whiskey or doing the line of cocaine.

Jack Unterweger was born a few years after World War II in Vienna. His mother was a barmaid (whom Jack later characterized, probably incorrectly, as a prostitute); his father was an American GI whose identity remains uncertain. Raised partly by his maternal grandfather in rural Austria, Jack began abusing alcohol by age twelve. This was followed by a period of juvenile delinquency: he committed theft, fraud, burglary, and robbery. He committed his first murder when he was twenty-four. By this time, he had grown into a highly intelligent and boyishly handsome charmer—a kind of Middle European counterpart to America's Ted Bundy. Initially sentenced to life in prison, his stay was downgraded—with a softness in sentencing that has come to typify postwar European courts—to fifteen years.

While in prison, Jack wrote an autobiography called Purgatory, or the Life in Prison, which, unbeknownst to the public, was filled with self-serving lies and distortions.76 The book won Unterweger many ardent supporters from the leftist and counterculture press. He was even able to con various psychiatrists, who convinced themselves and the public that he was a changed man, remorseful and cured of his hostility toward women. This helped accelerate his release in May of 1990. It wasn't long afterward that Unterweger used his considerable charm both to acquire girlfriends and supporters (who succeeded in launching a movie about his book)—as well as female victims, whom he sodomized, bound with ligatures, strangled, and murdered in the Vienna woods. He even managed to go to Los Angeles, ostensibly to “study” prostitutes in that city, and murdered three prostitutes in the same fashion as the female victims back home.

Like many serial killers, Jack had a “signature” killing method: he strangled his victims with their own bras. A classic sexual sadist, he experienced orgasm at the moment of strangling the women to death. When he was finally arrested, his former supporters were dumbstruck at how they had been conned and betrayed. When rearrested and put back in prison in 1994, he showed his loyalty to the choking method, twisting the strings in his prison clothing into a noose—and hanging himself. There is yet a final twist. Because he died before he could appeal the verdict for his eleven murders, the verdict—according to the peculiarities of Austrian law—is not valid. So in Austrian eyes, he is still, officially at least, “innocent.”77

There are eerie similarities between the Unterweger case and that of another accomplished psychopath, Jack Henry Abbott. Born to an American soldier and a Chinese prostitute in 1944, he was in and out of foster homes, became a juvenile delinquent, and served time in Utah for forgery. His stay there was extended after he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. Inspired by Norman Mailer's book about Gary Gilmore's murder and eventual execution, Abbott wrote In the Belly of the Beast. Thanks to Mailer's support (but despite the misgivings of the prison officials), Abbott won release on parole in 1981. A scant six weeks after winning his freedom, Abbott, lunching in a small New York City café, argued with the aspiring playwright Richard Adan, son-in-law of the owner, and stabbed him to death.78 Back in prison, he wrote another book—but this one was unsuccessful. He came up for possible parole in 2001 but was turned down because he expressed no remorse for the murder. A year later, fashioning a noose with shoelaces and bedsheets, Abbott hanged himself.79