The First Serial Killer

(1404–1440)

Who was the first serial killer? The answer to that question is a matter of historical debate. The term serial killer itself is, of course, a twentieth-century coinage, but it describes a certain psychological mind-set—an addiction to killing—that is all too common throughout the pages of history.

The earliest and most often mentioned name that fits the serial killer mold is that of a fifteenth-century French aristocrat. He was a warrior for his people’s freedom; he was a famously handsome man of exquisite taste; he was a gifted courtier and diplomat; he was comrade-in-arms to a famously virtuous woman who would later be canonized as a saint. And he was probably one of the most monstrous serial killers ever known . . .

Gilles de Rais

Bluebeard

A nineteenth-century illustration of the fairy tale Bluebeard. Although Gilles de Rais is a likely source for the tale, none of de Rais’s victims were his fianceés or his wife.

Gilles de Rais was born in 1404, the eldest son of the baron of Rais. France, at the time of Gilles’s birth, had already suffered greatly in what was later to be called the Hundred Years’ War with England, but worse was to come.

Gilles was orphaned when he was 11 and was raised by his maternal grandfather. We know that Gilles’s grandfather found it difficult to marry him off when the time came. This was not because he was in any way ugly—not that appearance mattered much in aristocratic matchmaking. He was actually quite striking, sporting a dapper beard so black that people swore that in certain lights it looked blueish. This earned Gilles the nickname “Bluebeard.”

A Stolen Bride

Gilles’s marital misfortunes were probably a matter of bad luck. Two potential brides died before marriage alliances could be cemented, but sudden death was not uncommon in the disease-ridden Europe of that time. Certainly there is no suspicion that the then teenaged Gilles had anything to do with the deaths. A third marriage attempt proved more fortunate.

In 1420 de Rais married a very wealthy heiress, Catherine de Thouars, and so became one of the richest men in Europe. The courtship did not go entirely smoothly—Catherine had to be kidnapped at one point in order to get the deal settled. France was in chaos at that time—with English armies conquering or laying waste to large swathes of the north—so the bandit matchmaking tactics of Gilles’s grandfather were probably seen as in step with the times.

The Namesake

It may be that the fairy tale Bluebeard—in which the eponymous villain marries repeatedly, only to murder his new wives the morning after the honeymoon—is the result of a mixing up of Gilles de Rais’s story: the dying fianceés, his striking nickname, and his later murders.

Choosing the Losing Side

Charles VII of France. The heir to the French throne found a friend in Gilles de Rais, who chose to fight the British alongside the Dauphin.

We first see Gilles acting on his own account when he arranged the release of the captured John VI, Duke of Brittany. He did this with such subtle aplomb that the Breton parliament awarded the young baron with a sizable financial reward, thus making him even richer. We can also see from this that, even in his early 20s, Gilles was evidently a smooth talker and a diplomatic courtier. We next hear of him attending the court of the Dauphin Charles, the heir to the French throne.

Gilles was taking an enormous chance by siding with Charles. The Dauphin was a singularly ineffectual man—he was unable to get the military and political backing to have himself crowned king of France. In the 1420s the likeliest outcome seemed to be England’s total conquest of France.

The Girl from Lorraine

Joan of Arc, also known as the Maid of Orléans, is credited with inspiring the French army to win their long war with England.

Something extraordinary then happened. In 1428 Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc in French), a young woman from the French province of Lorraine, heard voices in her head that she believed to be the messengers of God speaking to her. The voices told Joan to go to the Dauphin and declare that Heaven was on his side. Charles, bankrupt and terrified, was willing to try anything, so he sent Joan to lead his armies.

With Joan at their head they started a comeback that first recaptured the city of Orléans and eventually hurled the English out of France completely. Joan did not live to see this: she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, and then burned as a heretic by the Catholic Church in 1431.

Not surprisingly, much has been made of the relationship between Gilles de Rais and Joan of Arc: the savage monster side by side with the saintly virgin. Much of this seems to have been wishful thinking by later chroniclers. De Rais certainly knew Joan and probably fought alongside her in some battles, but he was not her bodyguard, as some have claimed, or even one of her key supporters.

The Spendthrift

An alchemist in his laboratory. Gilles, bleeding money because of his lavish lifestyle, became obsessed with finding the formula that would turn base metals into precious gold.

De Rais’s military title, Marèchal, was largely an honorary designation, bestowed upon him in 1429 by the former Dauphin—now King Charles VII. It was more a reward for Gilles’s financial loans than for his martial prowess. After the new king’s coronation in Orléans, and despite the fact that the war was still raging, de Rais retired to his comfortable estates, gadding between castles at Machecoul, Malemort, Champtocé, Tiffauges, and his other holdings.

He lived extravagantly, keeping a bodyguard of 200 knights, a private chapel, and one of the finest manuscript libraries in Europe. But soon these huge expenditures ate up his vast fortune.

Gilles was facing bankruptcy, so he turned to alchemy to mend his fortunes. Like many others of the time, he was seeking the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, which could supposedly turn all base metals to pure gold. In 1439 Gilles employed a defrocked priest, Francesco Prelati of Florence. It was probably Prelati who turned Gilles to the practice of black magic and invocations of the Devil, using the blood of young children.

Killing for the Devil of It

Only the ruins of Gilles de Rais’s castle at Tiffauges still stand, perched on a strategic hilltop position. These days re-creations of medieval weapons and alchemy equipment are on display inside the castle walls.

Over the next six years de Rais is said to have used his position as a baron to secretly kidnap dozens, perhaps hundreds, of peasant children, all of whom he tortured and killed. He was certainly a serial killer: the sheer numbers of children involved, and the hideously cruel methods used to murder them, do not point to a man whose only interest was the magical production of gold.

De Rais’s downfall began with what would have been, to a baron, a minor misdemeanor. He sold his estate at Malemort to the treasurer of Brittany, Geoffroi le Ferron, but then refused admission to Geoffroi’s brother, Jean le Ferron. When Jean insisted on his family’s rights, de Rais had him beaten and then imprisoned. But Jean le Ferron was a priest, and Bishop Malestroit seized on this pretext to try to have Gilles declared a heretic.

Trial by Torture

Preliminary hearings began on September 28, 1440, and Gilles’s accusers were so certain of finding him guilty that the authorities actually disposed of some of his lands before the trial even began. De Rais was charged with the abuse of a priest, conjuring demons, and sexual perversion involving children. The most shocking of the charges was “spurning the natural way of copulation.” Gilles had committed sodomy with young boys and girls . . . and his victims were sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes even in their death throes when he mounted them.

The formal trial opened on October 15, 1440. The dismembered, rotting bodies of about 50 children that had, it was said, been found in an abandoned tower at de Rais’s estate at Machecoul served as the key evidence. Gilles was himself tortured on October 19, as were his servants and four alleged accomplices.

Judicial torture as part of the examination process, it should be noted, was then so common as to be a virtual formality in all capital trials. Many, for example, had been shocked at Joan of Arc’s trial when she was not tortured, but was merely intimidated by being “shown the instruments [of torture].”

Execution by Rope and Fire

Child killer de Rais met as gruesome a fate as his victims. After being tortured and threatened into a confession, he was hanged and burned to death.

One servant, under extreme duress, declared that Gilles rubbed his penis against the thighs and bellies of children and, after achieving orgasm, took pleasure in seeing their heads cut off or in decapitating them himself. It was also alleged that he took great pleasure in watching the death throes of children, sometimes sitting on their chests while they were dying. It was said that, on one occasion, de Rais tortured and killed one boy in front of his brother, and then did the same to the remaining child.

His own torture apparently had less effect on Gilles than the threat of excommunication: the latter made him break down completely and confess everything. On October 26, 1440, de Rais was hanged, using a knot that garroted him slowly while his feet dangled and scorched in a blazing fire—a fate he shared with two of his associates. No final figure was ever arrived at for the number of children Gilles de Rais tortured and murdered: estimates ranged between 80 and 200.

Vlad the Impaler

(1431–1477)

The Wallachian prince Vlad Dracula can boast of a reputation as one of the worst sadists in world history. Some chroniclers estimate that in his brief reign—a mere six years—he killed 100,000 people, often by his favorite method of execution: impalement via the anus or vagina on a sharp pole.

Born in 1431 in the citadel town of Sighisoara, Transylvania, Vlad was the son of Vlad II Dracul, who received his last name when he entered the Order of the Dragon. Dracul, in the Romanian language means “dragon,” although it is also sometimes translated as “devil.” The surname Dracula therefore means “son of the dragon” or “son of the devil.” Vlad Dracula is also known as Vlad Tepes, Romanian for “Vlad the Impaler.”

Vlad Dracula

A Well of Hatred

Vlad’s grandfather, Mircea the Elder, sat on the throne of Wallachia from 1386 to 1418. Romanian historians consider Mircea one of the most important rulers of Wallachia, often referring to him as Mircea the Great.

Vlad’s grandfather, Mircea the Elder, has been described as a kind of Romanian Charlemagne; Vlad’s father was one of Mircea’s bastard sons, and he was placed on the throne of Wallachia (southern Romania) in 1436 with the aid of the Hungarians. But Vlad II had a problem: he had to remain equally friendly with two powerful neighbors—Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. This was no easy task. He lost his throne to the Hungarians in 1442 and regained it with the aid of the Turks the following spring.

Two years later, to gain the trust of the Turkish sultan Murad, Vlad II sent his two younger sons, Vlad and Radu, as hostages to the Ottoman Empire. Prince Vlad was convinced that he had condemned them to death; in fact, the Turks allowed them to live, largely because Sultan Murad had conceived lustful designs on Radu. Radu, known as Radu the Handsome, resisted strenuously at first, holding the sultan at bay with a dagger. But he finally gave way and became Murad’s “protégé.” Vlad remained a difficult prisoner; his harsh treatment hardened his character, making him vengeful.

Immortality of a Sort

In 1897, 410 years after his death, Vlad achieved a kind of dubious immortality as the namesake of the vampiric villain in Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula.

The Prince

Chindia Tower, built by Vlad, is a symbol of Tirgoviste, Romania, once the capital city of the Wallachian princes.

While Radu and Vlad remained in Turkish custody, the Hungarians attacked Vlad II again. Betrayed by his boyars (noblemen) he was defeated near Tirgoviste. His eldest and favorite son, Mircea, was buried alive. Vlad II himself was hunted down and killed. When the Turkish sultan heard that the Hungarians had killed their father, he gave the two boys their liberty. Meanwhile the Hungarian leader Janos Hunyadi had seized Vlad’s throne. But in new battles against the Turks, Hunyadi was defeated, and the 17-year-old Vlad entered Tirgoviste and appointed himself prince—Vlad III of Wallachia.

Vlad’s first taste of power lasted less than two months. After losing a battle to Vladislav II, who also claimed the throne of Wallachia, Vlad fled. For the next eight years, he was a virtual wanderer. In 1456 he made a second bid for the throne of Tirgoviste; this time his small army defeated Vladislav, and for the second time Vlad held the throne of Wallachia.

During the next six years he perpetrated the horrors that earned him the sobriquet “the Impaler.”

Vlad the Puritan

Vlad built his Poenari Castle high on a mountaintop above the city of Tirgoviste. To reach Vlad’s fortress, visitors must climb 1,500 steps.

His first act as ruler was to rebuild the ancient Poenari Castle on the River Arges, 20 miles north of Tirgoviste; after years of insecurity, he wanted an impregnable stronghold.

After his years in the Ottoman Empire, where Muslim women kept their faces covered, he was probably shocked to find that Christian women allowed themselves far more freedom. In reaction he announced that unfaithful wives were to have their sexual organs cut out, and then they were to be skinned alive and exposed in a public square. Girls who lost their virginity before marriage were to meet the same fate. Lesser sexual offences were punished by cutting off a nipple.

A chronicler describes how, when one of Vlad’s mistresses declared that she was pregnant, he had her examined by a doctor, who found it to be untrue. Vlad felt that her lie had exposed him to ridicule and ordered her to be cut open from the vagina to the breasts. He then looked at the dying woman’s exposed womb and remarked, “Now everyone can see where I have been.”

Banquet Among the Corpses

In 1459 Vlad decided to invade neighboring Transylvania. His first objective was the city of Brasov. Most of its inhabitants met their fates impaled on a hill near the church of Saint Bartholomew. After the impalements Vlad set up tables and held a banquet among the corpses. One boyar found the smell of blood and entrails too much for him and held his nose; Vlad immediately sent for a particularly long pole and had him impaled. He then invaded Sibiu, a town that had offered him refuge in his early years of wandering, and slaughtered 10,000 of his former fellow citizens. His Transylvania campaign continued into the following year. Two more towns that had defied him—Fagaras and Amlas—were burned, and more than 20,000 of the citizens impaled. Many surrounding areas were so completely destroyed that they simply vanished off the map. Vlad returned to Tirgoviste well satisfied with his triumphal campaign.

The First Blow

A woodcut from Vlad’s time depicts him enjoying the sight of his victims’ suffering from his favorite method of execution—impalement on a stake.

Vlad knew that sooner or later he would have to wage war against the Turks. Although they had helped him regain his throne in 1456, they demanded a tribute of 10,000 gold pieces a year and 500 children for their army. Vlad signaled his intention when invited to the Danube port of Giurgiu to meet the governor, Hamza Pasha. Certain that this was a trap, he approached the town with an army of 20,000 men—dense forests allowed them to make their approach unseen. Vlad’s army overwhelmed the garrison and forcibly marched the enemy soldiers back to Tirgoviste. Vlad ordered that the Turks be executed by impalement in a meadow outside the town. Hamza Pasha met his fate impaled upside down on a stake.

War Against the Turks

Vlad and his soldiers mount a daring night attack against the Turks.

As an old hand at warfare, Vlad understood the importance of striking the first blow. In winter 1461 his army burned down the city of Giurgiu and massacred its inhabitants. He counted 23,809 heads, noses, and ears. He then sent off messages to the Pope and to King Mathias of Hungary for help, but his reputation was so black, they ignored him. By the following spring, he had recognized that his only hope was to fight on alone. He advanced along the Danube (which divides Wallachia from Bulgaria), and then into Bulgaria, where many peasants, who were tired of Turkish oppression, joined him. But the need to besiege Turkish forts slowed him down. And in April Mohammed II set out from Byzantium to meet him.

Vlad was forced to retreat into Wallachia, leaving scorched earth behind him. By mid-June 1462 the Turkish sultan was approaching Tirgoviste. But on the way, in a narrow gorge, Mohammed came upon a forest of stakes, 20,000 of them, with rotting corpses impaled on them, many of them Turks.

When Mohammed II advanced into Tirgoviste the next day, he found a city reduced to burning ruins, and roads lined with the macabre sight of bodies impaled on stakes. Mohammed is said to have groaned: “What can one do against a man like this?” And because plague had appeared in his army, he decided to turn home. But he appointed Vlad’s brother Radu to continue the fight. Radu was now the prince of Tirgoviste.

Vlad in Decline

Insignia of the Order of the Dragon

Vlad retreated to his stronghold above the Arges River. His wife is said to have committed suicide by throwing herself from the battlements into the river. Vlad himself escaped over the Fagaras Mountains. The next morning, from the crest, they were able to look down on the Turkish assault on Poenari Castle.

His aim was to reach King Mathias of Hungary, whose forces were encamped at Brasov. But Mathias received him coolly, and within weeks, Vlad had been taken prisoner.

Vlad spent 12 of the remaining 14 years of his life in Hungary, first in Buda, then Visegrad, 20 miles away. His guards kept him supplied with small animals—birds, mice, rats, and toads—that he could torture or impale (He is said to have filled his cell with their skewered corpses.). Then, after only 4 years, Mathias not only decided to free him but also allow him to marry one of his own relatives. In order to do this, Vlad was made to renounce his Orthodox faith and become a Roman Catholic; he apparently did this without misgivings. He fathered two children and was given a house in Pesth.

In summer 1476 he set out to retake Wallachia, together with Hungarian armies led by Stephen Báthory and a Moldavian army led by his cousin Stephen. On November 8 he reentered Tirgoviste; he captured Bucharest a week later.

In January 1477 the Turks surprised Vlad’s small army of about 4,000 near Bucharest, and Vlad himself was killed in battle. A Slavic narrative claims that his own men assassinated him, but this is unconfirmed. We only know that his head reached Byzantium in February 1477, where it was publicly displayed. Those who went to gaze on the “monster” must have been surprised to see an ordinary looking man with a full mouth under a huge moustache. The headless body had been buried in an unmarked grave in the monastery of Snagov, on an island in a lake near Bucharest.

Ivan the Terrible

(1530–1584)

Ivan IV, the grandson of Prince Ivan the Great (1440–1505), was born in 1530; his father, Vassili III, died when he was three. His mother—who became regent—spoiled and pampered the young Ivan. When she died (probably poisoned), the 7-year-old Ivan quite suddenly found himself ignored and treated with contempt. A council of boyars—Russian nobles—took over the government, chief among whom were the Shuiskys.

Ivan had always been rather a brutal child. One of his favorite games was “splattering dogs,” dropping them from the top of a high tower into the courtyard far below. Now neglect and disdain hardened him into a bully and a sadist, who inflicted pain on anyone too weak to fight back.

Ivan IV

The First Tsar

In the Christmas of 1543, when he was 13, Ivan summoned the boyars before him and delivered a lecture. He disdainfully pointed out that they were misruling Russia and they were utterly corrupt. But this time, he said, only one of them would be punished. He turned and pointed his finger at Prince Andrew Shuisky. Ivan then ordered the hunting dogs set on him; the dogs tore Shuisky to pieces.

At 17 he decided to have himself crowned, and instead of calling himself “prince,” he chose the title “tsar,” derived from caesar, signifying that he was absolute ruler.

Ivan the Awesome

Known as Ivan Grozny in Russia, Ivan IV Vasilyevich has long been known as Ivan the Terrible in the English-speaking world. Modern English, however, doesn’t quite capture the original meaning of the word terrible, which now connotes “bad” or “evil.” A better translation of its intended meaning? “Ivan the Awesome.”

Choosing a Wife

Ivan sits by the deathbed of his first wife, Anastasia Romanova.

Ivan loved reading, but when his eyes tired he pursued sexual pleasures, treating the wives and daughters of the merchants as his private harem. But when it came time to wed, he summoned 2,000 girls from all over Russia. Midwives examined all of them; his bride had to be a virgin. He settled on Anastasia Romanova, a tall, striking girl of gentle disposition; they were married on February 3, 1547.

For the next 13 years Ivan was an admirable tsar, surrounding himself with good counselors. It all ended in 1560, with the death of his wife. This sweet-natured girl had always soothed him; but she had borne seven children in 10 years and her health had deteriorated. Her death revived his natural paranoia; he convinced himself that she had been murdered. Inevitably, there was a bloody purge of those he suspected.

Paranoia and Torture

Ivan cradles the body of his son. Ivan’s unpredictable temper cost him what was most dear to him: his son Ivan Ivanovich. Judging the attire of his pregnant daughter-in-law as immodest, he flew into a rage and beat her. When his incensed son confronted him, Ivan struck out with a pointed staff, killing his heir.

Ivan’s paranoia reached a climax in the destruction of the city of Novgorod. He had an idea that Novgorod intended treason, so he marched there with an army, burning, raping, and looting on the way. He arrived at the city in early 1570 and ordered a timber wall built around it to prevent any inhabitants from fleeing. Then, for the next five weeks, he directed an orgy of sadism. Every day several thousand were tortured to death while the tsar and his depraved son Ivan watched. The torturers invented all kinds of refinements: husbands and wives were roasted alive or beaten to death in each other’s presence; children were murdered in front of their mothers. More than 60,000 people perished.

By the time he arrived at his next destination, Pskov, his bloodlust had evaporated, and Ivan pardoned the city.

The Death of Ivan

Ivan, on his knees, beseeches the hegumen, or abbot, of Pskovo-Pechorsky Monastery to allow Ivan to join as a monk. In his last years Ivan displayed extreme mood swings, becoming increasingly violent and unbalanced. It wasn’t unusual for him to devote himself to days of fasting and fervent prayer after indulging himself in long nights of decadent orgies and bouts of gluttonous feasting.

Ivan’s death, at the age of 54, somehow suits his legend. He summoned a number of soothsayers to the court, and they forecast his death for March 18, 1584. Characteristically, Ivan told them that they would be burnt alive on that day if he still lived. Toward midnight on the 17th, Ivan reminded the soothsayers that they were to die the next morning. They pointed out that the day could not be said to have ended until the setting of the sun. The next evening, Ivan fell backwards, and a few minutes later, he was dead.

The Blood Countess

(1560–1614)

In Hungary a female descendant of Stephen Báthory, the general who had helped Vlad the Impaler to reconquer Wallachia, continued Vlad’s tradition of gore.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory was born in 1560 in a part of Hungary close to the Carpathians; her cousin Juraj Thurzó was palatine, or prime minister, of Hungary. At the age of 15 Elizabeth married Count Ferenc Nádasdy; his gift to her was his home, Cachtice Castle in the Little Carpathians. The count was a soldier and spent much of his time fighting against the Turks. But while the count was away fighting, his passionate young bride was left alone in the castle, her newly awakened sexuality doomed to frustration.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory

Bloody Hands

Her childhood nurse, Ilona Jó, had some knowledge of witchcraft, but it seems to have been one of her husband’s manservants, Thorko, who introduced her to practical “occultism.” She wrote to her husband: “Thorko told me how to catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear a little of it on your enemy.” Life in the castle bored her. She hated her mother-in-law and surrounded herself with astrologers and “magicians,” including a “witch” named Dorottya Szentes. And, inevitably, she was unfaithful to her husband. Little is known of the affair except that she eloped with a young nobleman who was reputed to be a vampire. Her husband forgave her, which would seem to indicate that he was under the spell of his young bride.

Between 1585 and 1590 she gave birth to three boys and a girl. In 1600 her husband died, and once again his bride was condemned to sexual frustration. On the other hand, as she was now mistress of the castle, she lost no time in sending away her hated mother-in-law. She also began to indulge in lesbian practices with her two maids, Barsovny and Otvos, chosen for their beauty.

Her sadism began by accident when she lost her temper with a maid who pulled her hair while combing it. Elizabeth slapped her so hard that she drew blood, probably making the girl’s nose bleed, and staining her own hands crimson. She was convinced that the skin where the blood had fallen was fresher and whiter. Had she discovered the secret of eternal youth? She ordered her servants Thorko and János Újváry to murder the maid and drain her blood into a bath. Elizabeth then stripped and immersed herself in the blood, rubbing it all over her body.

Finding Victims

Did Elizabeth bathe in the blood of her victims?

Her servants kidnapped children and teenage girls from the surrounding area, and they locked some of the girls in dungeons, where they were fattened up—Elizabeth believed that the fatter they were, the more blood they had in their veins. She was completely convinced that her baths in blood were keeping her young. During the course of 10 years, she killed about 50 girls—at least, this is the number of corpses eventually discovered buried in the castle grounds.

Caught

The turning point in the countess’s career came when one of her victims escaped and went to the authorities. Elizabeth’s cousin, Juraj Thurzó, the palatine of Hungary, led a band of soldiers to Cachtice Castle on the night of December 30, 1610; in the main hall they found a girl whose body had been drained of blood, and another who was covered with small punctures made by a sharp instrument. In the dungeons there were more girls in the same condition. It seems clear that the countess had “milked” them like blood cows until they died.

Thurzó had no choice but to place his cousin under house arrest.

Whatever Works . . .

Strangely enough, her recipe for eternal youth seemed to work, and the countess remained remarkably youthful.

Nonetheless there is a great deal of doubt surrounding the veracity of the claims that Elizabeth Báthory killed so that she could bathe in blood. It is more likely that the killing and torture just gave her sadistic pleasure.

In her own time she was known not as the Blood Countess but as the Tigress of Cachtice.

Trial and Sentence

Cachtice Castle, sited high above the village of Cachtice, was built in the mid-thirteenth century. Elizabeth’s husband gave her the castle and its surrounding lands and villages as a wedding gift in 1575. It was first her home and then, in the last three years of her life, served as her prison. It now sits in ruins.

Her trial took place at Bitcse in January and February 1611, although she herself never appeared in the courtroom and refused to plead either innocent or guilty. The majordomo, János Újváry, testified that he knew about 37 girls who had been killed, 6 of whom he brought to the castle with promises of jobs. Their bodies were then pierced and the blood drained into dishes.

At the conclusion of the trial, Judge Theodosius de Szulo pronounced sentences of death on Thorko, Újváry, and the two maids, Barsovny and Otvos; all were to be beheaded. Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentes were to have their fingers torn out one by one before they were burned alive. The countess herself was not sentenced; although the king had demanded the death penalty, he finally agreed to Thurzó’s demand that it should be delayed indefinitely. Instead they sent stonemasons to Cachtice Castle, and they walled up Elizabeth Bathory inside her own chamber, with only a small aperture through which she might receive food. She lived on for another three years, until she was 54. On August 21, 1614, a new guard peeped through the aperture and saw that the countess was lying still on the floor; Elizabeth Báthory was dead.

The West Port Murders

(1827–1828)

In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh, Scotland, had some of the best medical schools in the world. The city also had a serious ongoing problem: a shortage of cadavers on which the many schools’ numerous medical students could practice their skills in dissection. This cadaver shortage was so acute that many professors of anatomy were disinclined to ask questions when they were offered a fresh corpse. After all no one bothered too much if “body snatchers” had disinterred it the day after it was buried.

William Hare

Tanner’s Close

In a remote part of town there was an alley just off the West Port called Tanner’s Close, which contained a boarding house for vagrants. A widow, Margaret Laird, ran it in company with William Hare, a tall, thin Irish immigrant. One of the lodgers, Irishman William Burke, lived there with his mistress, Helen MacDougal. In 1828 the two men became partners in a profitable joint enterprise—selling corpses.

At first, murder was far from their thoughts. Then a Highlander known as Old Donald died in his room in the house, owing rent. Hare thought that a medical school would probably be willing to pay for the body. So Donald’s coffin was filled with tanbark and his body sold to an unofficial anatomist, Dr. Knox, of 10 Surgeon’s Square, for £7, a profit of £4 over and above the rent Donald owed.

Murder for Profit

The University of Edinburgh, 1827. Known for its medical school, one of the oldest in the world, this was but one of the schools that needed cadavers for students to dissect.

With the happy—for them—outcome of earning some respectable profit, Burke and Hare decided that selling corpses was an ideal way of making a living. Still, body snatching was a more dangerous occupation than Burke’s trade of cobbling. They may have realized that obtaining the “merchandise” put them at risk. At which point Joe the Mumper fell ill. His fever was a serious inconvenience; it kept away other lodgers. So Burke and Hare decided to hasten his end with the aid of a pillow pressed over his face; Hare sat on his legs while Burke suffocated him. They obtained another £10, in gold, for the corpse.

Gruesome Rhymes

A well-known rhyme of the period ran:

Burke’s the murderer, Hare’s the thief

And Knox the boy who buys the beef.

Into Their Stride

A newspaper illustration of the house in Tanner’s Close shows the back court. The window marked “A” was Burke’s. “B” shows the entrance where Burke and Hare brought the bodies out.

On February 11, 1828, they lured Abigail Simpson, a hawker of hearthstone and salt, into the house and plied her with whisky. The killers were still novices, which explains why Abigail lived through the night, was made drunk again the next day, and then killed. Dr. Knox asked no questions and paid £10 for her body.

Burke and Hare had now perfected their method—getting the victim drunk—and stuck to it. The stream of victims continued steadily: in May they murdered an Englishman with jaundice. Their next victim, a good-looking young prostitute named Mary Patterson, was a risk because she was with another girl, Janet Brown, when Burke picked her up. When Helen MacDougal showed up unexpectedly, she assumed the worst—that Burke was enjoying the girls’ services, and she burst into such abuse that Janet left in a hurry. Then Hare arrived, and they soon dispatched Mary. One of Knox’s students recognized her as a girl he had patronized, but Burke explained that he had just bought the body from an old woman.

Next came an unnamed cinder woman. Burke and Hare plied her with whisky until she was half-conscious before suffocating her. Their next victim was an elderly prostitute, Mary Haldane. When Haldane’s daughter later met Hare in the street and asked if he knew where her mother had gone, he offered to take her to join her. And in due course, the daughter’s corpse joined her mother’s in a dissection room. On one occasion Burke and Hare killed an old woman and her 12-year-old grandson and raked in £16 for the pair of corpses.

As they had recognized Mary Patterson, the dissecting medical students also recognized the next victim: a mentally retarded teenager, known as “Daft Jamie.” Still they did not turn in the cadaver sellers.

Caught at Last

A contemporary newspaper headline announces the verdict in Burke’s trial for the “horrid murders” that he committed with his partner, Hare.

The final murder victim—probably the 14th—was a widow, Marjorie Campbell Docherty. Lodgers at the boarding house, James and Ann Gray, found her body under a bed and went to the police. By the time the police arrived, Burke and Hare had already sold the body, but they told contradictory stories and were arrested.

The trial opened on December 24, 1828, and was the sensation of the year. Only Burke was tried, while Hare entered what is now called a plea bargain. Burke was found guilty and hanged to death in front of a record crowd on January 29, 1829. Hare died as a blind old beggar in London.

The Murder Castle

(1893–1895)

The most notable American multiple murderer of the nineteenth century was a man named Herman Webster Mudgett, who (understandably) preferred to call himself Harry Howard Holmes. Like so many con men, the charming, good-looking Holmes was a natural. He provides a powerful argument for the belief that certain people are just born bad—in fact, downright rotten.

He was born in 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, the son of a post-master. He studied medicine at the University of Michigan and practiced his first swindle in his early 20s—involving the faked death of a patient he had insured and the theft of a corpse (from the medical school) that the insurance company believed to be the dead man.

H. H. Holmes

Vanishing Women

Bird’s-eye view of the Chicago World’s Fair. The massive fair brought an influx of transients to the city and surrounding areas, such as Englewood, making it hard for the police to estimate the number of Holmes’s victims.

After graduation, Holmes moved to Englewood, Illinois, just south of Chicago, where he came across Dr. E. S. Holton’s drugstore. Holton, too sick from cancer to mind the store, had turned it over to his wife. Slick Holmes soon worked as Mrs. Holton’s assistant; within three years Mrs. Holton had vanished, and Holmes owned the store. He did so well that he built himself a three-story, block-long “castle” across the street. He moved the drugstore into the ground floor, along with other shops. The second floor held a labyrinth of small rooms, some windowless. Holmes equipped his castle with chutes leading from most rooms to the basement—where a large furnace sat—and a network of pipes arranged so that he could flood any room with gas. When the World’s Fair came to Chicago in 1893, he claimed that he had built a mansion to house the Fair’s numerous guests.

During the next three years, the “Murder Castle” hosted an orgy of death. Holmes seduced Julia Conner, whose husband rented space in the drugstore; when the husband found out and left, Julia stayed on with Holmes. So did her sister, Gertie, who also became Holmes’s mistress. When Gertie became pregnant, she vanished. So did pretty 16-year-old Emily Van Tassell, who often came into the shop with her mother. When Julia objected to Holmes’s new secretary, Emily Cigrand, Julia disappeared. And soon after, so did Emily. The following year another mistress, Minnie Williams, and her sister, Nannie, also disappeared. These and other victims met grisly fates; some died locked in rooms flooded with deadly gas, others suffocated in a large bank vault. Bodies exited by the basement chutes, where they were cremated in the furnace or left in quicklime and acid pits. Holmes sold some of the corpses to medical schools. Body count estimates—based on missing persons reports—range from 20 to 230.

Mass Murder

The Chicago Tribune ran a plan of the second floor of the “Murder Castle,” with insets showing the chutes, quicklime pits, and furnace. Holmes hired and fired builders weekly so that no one but him knew the exact layout of the structure. The second floor contained secret hallways and closets that connected the warren of bedrooms. Some of these were soundproof and had peepholes so that Holmes could watch his victims’ agony. There is evidence that Holmes held many of his victims captive for months before he finally killed them.

Holmes had furnished his castle on credit, and when he fell behind in the payments, the lending company went to reclaim its furniture. The house proved to be empty, but, acting on a tip, the lenders found the furniture walled up in a sealed room.

Holmes then left his castle and Chicago and landed in jail for petty fraud, where he met Marion Hedgepeth, a convicted train robber. He asked for Hedgepeth’s advice on finding a crooked lawyer, offering to cut Hedgepeth in on an insurance fraud he had in the works. The swindle was similar to the “corpse fraud” he’d committed in Michigan. An accomplice, Ben Pitezel, was supposed to “die” in a laboratory explosion. Holmes, having insured his life, would substitute a medical school cadaver and share the insurance money with Pitezel.

In fact Pitezel’s death was all too real. Holmes assured Mrs. Pitezel that her husband was now in hiding; in reality, his plan was to kill Mrs. Pitezel and her five children and then keep the $5,000 insurance payment.

Hedgepeth ruined this plan. Enraged that Holmes had failed to pay him his “cut,” he subsequently squealed to the police. Police exhumed Pitezel’s body—chloroform had killed him.

On the Run

The Holmes case received wide publicity. After his conviction, the Hearst newspaper syndicate paid Holmes $7,500 to write his story.

The search was on for Holmes. He was missing and so were three of Pitezel’s five children: Alice, 15; Nellie, 11; and Howard, 9. Holmes had taken them off “to rejoin their father.”

The law caught up to Holmes before he could complete his plan and murder the rest of the Pitezel family. Investigators sadly unearthed the girls’ bodies from the cellar of a rented house in Toronto; they located Howard’s charred remains in a stove in Indiana.

Tried in October 1895, Holmes was found guilty and sentenced to death. He wrote a “confession” for the Hearst newspapers, claiming 27 murders, and then withdrew it and declared innocence. Executed in May 1896, he choked slowly at the end of a poorly tied noose.

The Butcher of Hanover

(1919–1924)

Defeated in World War I, Germany sank into a terrible depression after the Armistice in 1918. Hanover, in Saxony, was one of the hardest-hit places. It was there, in a ravaged and starving city, that Fritz Haarmann committed one of the most horrific series of crimes in modern times.

Fritz Haarmann

Bad Beginnings

Haarmann, born in October 1879, was the sixth child of a morose locomotive stoker and his invalid wife, seven years his senior. Fritz was his mother’s pet, and he hated his father. He liked playing with dolls and detested games. At 16 his family sent him to a military school at New Breisach, but the school soon released him when he showed signs of epilepsy. He then went to work for his father, but he proved lazy and inefficient. Accused of indecent behavior with small children, he was sent to an asylum for observation. Released after six months, he took to petty crime and continued his indecent assaults on minors. Even though he was jailed several times for burglary and confidence trickery, his father tried to give him respectable work, setting him up as the keeper of a fish-and-chips shop. Fritz promptly stole all the money he could lay his hands on.

After four years in jail for theft, he joined a smuggling ring in 1918. From his Hanover headquarters at 27 Cellarstrasse, he conducted business as a smuggler, thief, and police spy. This last assured him immunity for his illegal activities, and Haarmann enjoyed illicit commercial success.

Terror in Saxony

Some of the bones recovered from the river Leine. They were identified as those of at least 27 of Haarmann’s victims.

After the war many refugee trains came into Hanover, providing easy prey for Haarmann. Haunting the train station, he picked up incoming youths and offered them a night’s lodging.

One of the first of these young men was 17-year-old Friedel Rothe. After they reported him missing, the lad’s worried parents learned that he had been friendly with “Detective” Haarmann. The police then searched Haarmann’s room, but found nothing (Haarmann later admitted that the boy’s head lay wrapped in newspaper behind his stove at the time.). Then they caught Haarmann engaged in sodomy with another boy, and he received nine months in jail for indecency.

In 1919 Haarmann met the young Hans Grans, a pimp and petty thief. Although Grans’s original intent was to make some money off the openly homosexual older man, the pair struck up an odd friendship. Soon Grans moved in with Haarmann, and the two formed a sinister alliance. Their method of murder was always the same: they enticed young men from the railway station back to Haarmann’s rooms, Haarmann sodomized them and then killed them (according to his own account, by biting through their windpipes while in the throes of lust). The pair then dismembered the victims’ bodies, which they later sold as meat. The victims’ clothes were sold and the useless (in other words, inedible) body parts thrown into the river Leine. At the trial, a list of 28 victims emerged, their ages ranging between 13 and 20. One boy was killed only because Grans liked his trousers.

Arrest and Trial

The mass grave of the 27 identified victims of Fritz Haarmann. A memorial to them stands in the Cemetery Hannover Stoecken. Haarmann was convicted of killing 24 of these young men.

In May 1924 two skulls were found on the banks of the river Leine. Two detectives from Berlin arrested Haarmann and again searched his lodgings, removing many articles of clothing. Soon after, boys playing near the river discovered a sack full of bones. A police pathologist calculated that they represented the remains of at least 27 different bodies.

The police subjected Haarmann to intense questioning. It took them a week—and quite a few rages on Haarmann’s part—but finally he decided to make a full confession. And with the confession came a change of attitude. Haarmann was now utterly helpful—even taking police through the streets of Hanover, pointing out where he had disposed of bodies. Based on what Haarmann was telling them, the police also arrested Grans.

Haarmann’s trial opened on December 4, 1924, at the Hanover Assizes. It went on for 14 days and took in the testimony of hundreds of witnesses. During the proceedings Haarmann, who chose to represent himself, was unexpectedly merry and nonchalant—and often completely irresponsible. He frequently interrupted witnesses, he complained that there were too many women in the courtroom, and he hurried up witnesses whom he found dull. The judge was oddly lenient, though, and rather than remonstrating Haarmann, he apologized that he could not keep women out of the room and even let the defendant light up a cigar during one distraught mother’s broken-hearted testimony.

Haarmann persisted to the end in his explanation of how he had killed his victims—biting them through the throat. Some boys he denied killing—for example, whose photograph showed an unattractive, badly dressed young man. Haarmann declared that the Wolf wasn’t his type; he was far too ugly. What he did do, was implicate Grans—some say he wanted to make sure that his companion followed him into death.

Haarmann was found guilty and sentenced to death by beheading. Grans was found guilty of inciting murder. He also received a death sentence. Before he died Haarmann produced a full confession; it is an explicit account full of sexual violence that makes clear the pleasure he took in committing the murders.

Buckets of Blood

Haarmann had some narrow escapes. Once, a suspicious buyer asked the police to analyze some meat from one of Haarmann’s sellers, but the analysis judged it to be pork. On another occasion, a neighbor stopped to talk to him on the stairs when some paper blew off the bucket he was carrying; it seemed to contain blood.

Dr. Marcel Petiot, Amateur SS Man

(1940–1944)

France in the aftermath of World War II was a divided country. The Allied defeat of the German occupiers and the honor earned by the bravery of the French Resistance still could not efface the shame that so many French citizens collaborated with the Nazis. Then news broke of the capture of a man who had not just supported the fascists but had apparently also copied their homicidal methods. Doctor Marcel Petiot was a con man, an egotist, and a sadist. And he was also a serial killer who had murdered refugees from the Nazis in a homemade gas chamber.

Marcel Petiot

Small-Town Politics, Medicine . . . and Murder?

Petoit was born in Auxerre in 1897, son of a minor official in the French Post Office. In 1918 he qualified to study medicine. There can be no doubt of his remarkable mental abilities. He spent part of his three years of medical study in a mental asylum and the rest at home with his mother, yet she later declared that she never saw him study. Nevertheless Petiot successfully qualified as a doctor in 1921.

He became a general practitioner in the town of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, in the Bourgogne region and in 1928 was elected mayor. Still a bachelor, he employed a strikingly attractive housekeeper. But shortly after she became noticeably pregnant, she suddenly disappeared. She was never seen again.

Not long after, Dr. Petiot married. Later in the 1930s, following a scandal concerning certain other unexplained disappearances in the town, Dr. Petiot moved his practice to Paris.

How to Utilize a War

In May 1940 the Germans invaded France. After six weeks of savage fighting, and after suffering 130,000 soldiers killed in action, France surrendered to Nazi occupation in July 1940. Almost immediately French Jews and other “undesirables” started to be rounded up and sent east to German concentrations camps and, for very many of them, death. A lot of people suddenly needed to get out of France as quickly and quietly as possible. Dr. Petiot evidently realized this. When he moved to Paris, he decided to ruthlessly take advantage of them.

It seems probable that Petiot acquired his Paris house at 21 Rue Le Sueur with the express purpose of committing multiple murders. On his instructions a builder made certain alterations to the structure, completing them in September 1941. Other, more sinister, constructions were made by Dr. Petiot himself in secret. Petiot also bought a flat and a small consulting room at 66 Rue Caumartin, which was where his wife and son lived.

A detailed list of Petiot’s victims is not known, but it seems reasonably certain that the first “refugee victim” was a Polish furrier named Joachim Gusbinov—a neighbor of Petiot’s in the Rue Caumartin. Fearing Nazi deportation to Poland, Gusbinov had sold his fur business and withdrew two million francs from his bank. Then in January 1942 he called on Petiot at Rue Le Sueur and was never seen again.

Tears fall as Parisians watch German tanks roll in.

False Hope

Four of Petiot’s many victims. From left, Gisèle Rossny, Joseph Réocreux, Annette Basset, and François Albertini

Other early victims of Petiot were a colleague of his, Dr. Paul Braunberger, and a whole family of refugees, the Knellers. All these victims were told that Petiot had contacts who could, for 25,000 francs, spirit them out of France to Argentina. None, having entered, ever saw the outside of 21 Rue Le Sueur again.

Petiot employed four men to find his victims. These agents lounged around cafes and bars on the lookout for men and women who wanted to escape abroad. These employees had no idea of the ultimate fate of the doctor’s “customers” and probably felt that they were helping to save people from the Nazi occupation.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

The murders continued through 1942 until May 1943. Then, ironically, Petiot was arrested by the Gestapo under suspicion of helping saboteurs to escape from France. His arrest was preceded by a nasty incident: the Gestapo blackmailed a Jewish man into calling on Petiot to inquire about escaping. When the man disappeared, the Germans assumed that he had taken advantage of Petiot’s escape facilities. In fact, of course, the Germans had accidentally sent yet another Jew to his death.

Although all Gestapo records were later destroyed by the retreating Germans, it seems likely that Dr. Petiot confessed that he was not helping refugees escape, but killing them instead. His interrogators must have thus been placed in an odd position—did they shoot him as a mass murderer or give him a medal for so enthusiastically embracing the Gestapo ideology? In the end they took the middle route and, in December 1943, released him without charge or comment. Petiot continued his career of murdering refugees, this time without fear of Nazi intervention.

Gestapo Fears

The Gestapo did not have it all their own way in Occupied France. Between early 1943 and summer 1944, the Toulouse Resistance group kidnapped, tortured, and killed so many Gestapo men, that the feared German secret police eventually didn’t dare to go outdoors without numerous bodyguards.

Black Smoke

On Saturday, March 11, 1944, Petiot’s neighbor in the Rue Le Sueur, Jacques Marcais, became sickened by the greasy black smoke that poured from his neighbor’s house and complained to the police. Two policemen called and found a card pinned to the door that directed inquiries to Rue Caumartin. They telephoned Petiot, who replied that he would be over immediately. But in the meantime the filthy smoke belching from the chimney so enraged the police sergeant that he called the fire brigade.

The chimney was on fire thanks, in part, to all the vaporized human fat that had previously passed through it. When the firemen forced an entry, they found the offending stove in the cellar. They also found the remains of 27 bodies lying around the cellar, most of them partly dismembered. As the police searched the house, Petiot entered and calmly walked around introducing himself as the owner.

When the police sergeant told him that he was under arrest in suspicion of multiple murder, Petiot showed his unpleasant streak of genius once again. He took the policeman aside and quietly told him that what he had discovered was the secret execution chamber of the Parisian French Resistance; the bodies were all those of pro-Nazis, collaborators, and other traitors, he assured him. This was a risk, of course, because if the sergeant had himself been a pro-Nazi it would have guaranteed Petiot’s arrest. But most Frenchmen were pro-Resistance, so the risk was not so great. The sergeant let the doctor go.

Forty-Seven Suitcases

The chief of police inspects the boiler in the triangle-shaped death chamber at 21 Rue Le Sueur. The boiler caused the smoky black fire that drew the police’s attention.

Petiot returned to the Rue Caumartin, packed some suitcases, and fled with his wife, Georgette, and 17-year-old son. The Gestapo joined the quisling French authorities in hunting the murderer, but they too had no luck in catching him.

Further investigation of the house on Rue Le Sueur showed just how Petiot had killed his victims. The triangular-shaped cellar was a homemade gas chamber. The doctor would get his victims to enter—doubtless claiming that it was a safe place to hide from the Germans until transport out of the country could be arranged. He then sealed the ceiling hatch from the outside and gassed them. Much of the “empty” upstairs of the house was filled with the belongings of his victims, including 47 empty suitcases. Further investigation suggested that he had sold many portable valuables, like jewelry, on the black market, gaining perhaps a million francs as a result.

But financial gain was clearly not the doctor’s main reason for killing men, women, and children. He had built a periscope into his gas chamber, allowing him to watch his victim’s death agonies.

Doctor on the Run

Petiot in court during his trial. Despite a hard-fought defense, a jury sentenced him to death.

In June 1944 came D-day, and on August 24 Paris was liberated. And Dr. Petiot remained at large.

He was arrested on November 2, 1944, as he left the Metro station at St. Mande Tourelle in the eastern outskirts of Paris. It turned out that he had been hiding in a flat in the Rue Faubourg, St. Denis, and had grown a beard. Because of a habit of standing at the open window with a hairy, bare chest, he became known locally as “Tarzan,” and a complaint had even been made to the police about his seminudism.

Petiot told the police that the 27 bodies found in his cellar were mostly those of German soldiers. He admitted that he had killed 63 people, but declared that he had done so on the orders of the Resistance and that he had also helped many patriotic Frenchmen to escape. Unfortunately, he said, none of these could vouch for him since, of course, they were all away in South America. He even named several famous Resistance leaders as his colleagues . . . and again unfortunately, they all just happened to be dead.

Execution of the Executioner

Workmen in the La Santé Prison courtyard clean and dismantle the guillotine, after it carried out the execution of Petiot. Blood still stains the pavement.

His trial opened after 17 months of investigation, on March 18, 1946. A key moment was when a Resistance officer was called to prove that Petiot was completely ignorant of many matters in which he claimed inside knowledge. In his own evidence to the court Petiot put up a spirited defense, but also came across as arrogant and egotistical. When the jury eventually convicted him, Dr. Petiot bellowed with rage and fought with his guards. He was guillotined on the morning of May 26, 1946.

The final number and identities of Petiot’s victims are unknown. He himself admitted to 63 murders, but the figure is probably higher. We do know that he killed entire families at the same time—just as the SS did in the extermination camps.

The Unabomber

(1970s–1990s)

What is now called “eco-terrorism”—that is, militant action taken against people or organizations that are believed to be damaging the environment—has been taking place since the 1960s. Most such actions are, fortunately, relatively harmless—animal rights activists set laboratory test animals free, demonstrators trespass into restricted areas to make protests, and antiglobalization riots occasionally wreck multinational-owned burger outlets. But such “eco-terrorists” generally revere human life as much as they do all life on the planet, so rarely try to harm other people. One exception, however, stands out . . .

Theodore Kaczynski

Striking from a Distance

A Unabomber-style bomb, reproduced by the FBI, is on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

The so-called “Unabomber” terrorized the United States for most of two decades. For much of that time investigators believed that he was simply a serial killer with an unusual method of killing victims. It was only toward the end of the Unabomber’s reign of terror that his ecological excuse for murder became plain.

On May 25, 1978, a small parcel bomb wounded a security guard at Northwestern University in Illinois. This was the first—and amateurish—attack made by the serial killer who later became known as “the Unabomber.” Over the next 18 years, the Unabomber would send homemade, but increasingly sophisticated, parcel bombs to educational establishments, technology companies, and corporate businesses.

Police were doubly flummoxed by this method of attack: not only was the killer murdering apparently random strangers—the first and greatest problem in serial crime investigation—but he or she was also striking from a distance, using the unwitting U.S. Postal Service as an accomplice. There were no personal links to lead to the killer from the victims and no possibility of chance eyewitnesses identifying the murderer.

Between May 1978 and December 1985, the Unabomber sent out nine, fortunately nonfatal, parcel bombs. Two were intercepted and defused, but the others injured 18 people, some seriously. One of these bombs—which wounded United Airlines president Percy A. Wood—earned the bomb maker the media nickname “the Un.A. bomber,” later simplified to “the Unabomber.”

Hand Delivered

December 1985, in Sacramento California, saw the first fatal Unabomber attack. Hugh C. Scrutton tried to remove a package left lying in the car park behind his computer rental shop. It exploded, killing him.

This bomb had not been delivered by the postal service; it had been simply left in the parking lot. It seemed likely, therefore, that the killer had put it there in order to watch, from a distance, the result of his or her handiwork. Unfortunately nobody had seen the booby-trap bomb being planted. The next bombing followed the same pattern.

On February 20, 1987, the killer left a bomb in the parking lot outside a computer firm in Salt Lake City, Utah. This time, however, a secretary in the firm spotted the bomber placing the booby trap. She thought it odd that the tall man in the hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses should leave a lump of wood—with nails sticking out of it—right where it might damage somebody’s tires. Unfortunately, before she could alert anyone, her boss, Gary Wright, drove into the lot, got out of his car, and kicked the lump of wood out of his path. The resulting explosion blew off his leg but did not kill him.

Lying Low

Police widely circulated this composite sketch of the Unabomber, made from the first witness’s description.

Police were delighted to have even a sketchy description of the Unabomber and plastered the artist’s reconstruction all over the national media. Any doubt that the Unabomber intended his bombs to kill had been removed by the last two attacks: both bombs had been packed with metal fragments, designed to shred their victims with flying shrapnel. But at least he seemed to have given up killing from a distance—the temptation to see the results of his murders had obviously been too great.

Unfortunately the publication of the witness description inadvertently removed this advantage. The Unabomber stopped sending bombs for six years—presumably frightened that the police might identify him—and when he struck again he did so using his older and (for him) safer method of delivery: the U.S. Postal Service.

On June 22, 1993, a parcel bomb badly injured Professor Charles Epstein, a leading geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, partly destroying his hand and sending shrapnel through his chest and across his face. Only swift medical aid saved his life.

The next day a similar parcel bomb seriously critically injured computer scientist David Gelernter of Yale University. He lost most of his right hand and the sight and hearing on his right side. He too survived, but only after he underwent extensive medical treatment.

Oklahoma

Advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser died when he opened a package bomb sent by the Unabomber to his New Jersey home.

On December 10, 1994, a parcel bomb killed New York advertising executive Thomas Mosser. There were doubts that this was a genuine Unabomber attack until someone pointed out that one of Mosser’s corporate clients was the Exxon oil company—responsible, in many people’s eyes, for recklessly polluting the environment. Less than five months later, on April 24, timber industry lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray picked up a parcel, supposedly sent by a firm called Closet Dimensions. As Murray picked up the package, one of his staff members joked: “It’s heavy. Must be a bomb.” The blast was particularly powerful, destroying Murray’s head and upper body but not killing anyone else. Fortunately he was to be the Unabomber’s last victim.

American domestic terrorism, however, was about to enter a deadly new chapter. No longer would it be dominated by the work of the Unabomber. On April 19, 1995—on the second anniversary of the federal raid that led to the deaths of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult—a bomb, hidden in a parked truck, demolished much of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One hundred and sixty-eight people, including 19 children in a daycare center on the ground floor, were killed.

One British newspaper echoed the suspicions of many in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing with its headline: IN THE NAME OF ALLAH. It came as something of a shock to many who believed the complicity of Muslim terrorists, therefore, when investigators arrested American Gulf War veteran, Timothy McVeigh.

McVeigh confessed to the bombing, citing his violent opposition to federal gun-control laws as his motive. He was executed on June 11, 2001.

Bomb Envy

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times published the Unabomber’s manifesto, in an effort to prevent further violence.

In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, the Unabomber sent a “manifesto” to the Washington Post and the New York Times—threatening to blow up a passenger jet if it were not promptly published. The Unabomber, it seemed, resembled a lot of serial killers in his fantasy that he was the most feared man in the world. The Oklahoma bomb had evidently made him feel inadequate, so he was upping the stakes.

The manifesto proved to be a rambling screed that attacked big business, environmentally damaging government policies, scientific research, and progress in general. The opening paragraph read:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

A Hero in His Own Lights

Pages from the Unabomber’s handwritten notes, showing a map with info on hidden supplies

It was plain that the Unabomber believed that all development since the Industrial Revolution was dangerous and damnable. He was evidently a well-educated, well-read man, and many of the things he stated in his manifesto were simply extreme extensions of mainstream environmentalism.

But he was also delusional and self-justifying, insisting that his bomb campaign had been the only way to make the media pay attention to his message. It may have been true that there were few avenues to attack modern technology through the conventional, pro-technology U.S. media, but killing to get people’s attention completely undermined his own cause.

And the fact that he had almost certainly watched the explosions that killed Hugh C. Scrutton and crippled Gary Wright placed the Unabomber firmly in the serial killer category. Whatever environmental and political self-justification he offered, he was not an ecological activist: he was a homicidal sadist.

A Brilliant Maniac

Fortunately, the manifesto was the last terror package the Unabomber was ever to send. David Kaczynski, in Montana, read the Unabomber’s manifesto and realized with horror that it sounded exactly like the rantings of his hermit-like older brother, Theodore. Most telling was the reversal of the old homily: “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

The Unabomber, insisting that the positive uses of technology were not worth the negative side effects, wrote: “you can’t eat your cake and have it.” This was a family habit of phrasing the well-known quotation, picked up from their mother, and its inclusion convinced David that Theodore was the Unabomber. With natural misgivings David Kaczynski informed the FBI, who raided Theodore’s isolated Montana cabin and found plenty of proof that he was the Unabomber.

Theodore J. Kaczynski had been a brilliant academic—in 1967, at just 25, he had been appointed an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. But two years later Kaczynski suffered a total emotional breakdown and had subsequently become a recluse in Montana. Living in an isolated log cabin, Kaczynski believed he followed a life that was in tune with nature—making bombs with parts carefully hand-carved from wood and roiling in hatred for the modern world.

In 1996 Ted Kaczynski was sentenced to four life sentences, with parole permanently denied.

The Manson Family

(August 1969)

The hippie movement energized and defined the culture of the late 1960s in North America and Europe. The hippie belief in free love and pacifism seemed to many to be the route to a new golden age in human history. But then one hippie guru went power mad, and the nightmare publicity from the resulting atrocities marked the beginning of the end for hippiedom as a leading mass movement.

Charles Manson

The Making of a Cult Leader

Three of Manson’s followers holding a sit-in outside the Los Angeles County Courthouse. His followers—almost all of them were young women—remained loyal to him even after his arrest for murder.

Charles Milles Manson was born in 1934 to Kathleen Maddox, an unmarried, teenaged alcoholic. He began committing petty crimes by the age of 9, and by his 30s Manson had spent more than half of his life in jail.

In 1967 Manson, now 33, was released from prison. Moving to San Francisco—the unofficial capital of the growing hippie movement—he turned to panhandling. Then he met a young librarian from Berkeley, Mary Brunner, and was soon living with her. Manson persuaded her that the enlightened, free-love thing to do would be to allow him to bring other women back to their flat. Soon he had 18 new female flatmates/lovers, most of whom saw him as a hippie guru.

Adopting a Family

Beach Boy Dennis Wilson in the early 1970s. In 1968 Wilson found himself having to rid his home of unwanted houseguests, after he took in some of Manson’s female followers and then Manson himself. While they lived there, the girls waited on both Wilson and Manson.

Charles Manson was a very articulate man, despite his tough past. He took elements from the Scientology he had read about in prison and then mixed them with his own LSD-inspired creed. He gave free talks in the Haight-Ashbury district—the very heart of hippiedom—and soon gathered what he called his “Family.” These were young, white, middle-class (mostly female) hippie followers, who came to believe Manson was a prophet.

The Family then went on the road, heading south to Los Angeles and eventually inviting themselves to stay at the Pacific Palisades home of Beach Boys drummer, Dennis Wilson. Wilson generously put up with this invasion and even the cost of having a number of the Family treated for gonorrhoea. Discovering that Manson was an aspiring singer-songwriter, Wilson introduced him to some of his music business connections and even paid for studio time to allow Manson to record a demo tape. But eventually the disruption of housing a hippie commune proved too much, and Wilson kicked them all out.

Helter Skelter

The dilapidated Spahn Movie Ranch, above, had been used from the 1940s to 1960s as a setting for many Western films. In 1968, with Westerns on the decline, George Spahn rented it to the Family. At left is map of the ranch, drawn by Family member Tex Watson.

By January 1969 the Family was renting an isolated property, the Spahn Movie Ranch, in the desert outside Los Angeles. Manson was by this time teaching them that a race war would soon break out between blacks and whites across the United States. Given the recent assassination of Martin Luther King and the National Guard suppression of African Americans during the L.A. Watts riots two years earlier, this must have seemed, to some, a reasonable expectation. The race war would lead, Manson prophesied, to a nuclear war that would destroy civilization. After which it was his fate to lead his Family to rule over humanity’s survivors in a postapocalyptic golden age.

Manson called this apocalypse Helter Skelter. He lifted this term from a Beatles song of the same name, believing that the Beatles also foresaw the end of civilization and were personally sending him a coded message to escape with his chosen followers. In fact a helter skelter is merely the name of a carnival ride common in Britain.

Music to Start a War

Record producer Terry Melcher, shown above, met Manson through Dennis Wilson. More than once Manson went to Melcher’s rented house at 10050 Cielo Drive to discuss recording his music.

Manson decided that the Family should record a song album, the hidden messages of which would spark the race war. Although record producer Terry Melcher showed some interest in recording Manson’s music and even talked about filming the Family at Spahn Ranch, Manson’s attempts to get his music published failed miserably. At one point, while trying to find Melcher, who had formerly lived in the rental property, Manson wandered onto the grounds of 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, now the home of movie director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate. Manson left without incident, but Tate later said that she found him “creepy.”

Manson then got in a spat over money with Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, a 300-pound African American drug dealer. Manson shot Crowe and escaped, believing that he had killed him. Crowe survived, but Manson was now convinced that the radical political group the Black Panthers would hunt him down. There was no longer any time to use music to subtly start the race war. The Family would now just have to murder some prominent white people, leave evidence that black radicals had committed the crimes, and then take cover when the apocalypse began. Manson assured his followers that they would be safe; he would lead them to Death Valley, he said, where they would hide in an underground city of gold.

Off Limits

Public officials gave new street numbers to the Polanski-Tate and LaBianca houses so that ghoulish tourists would stay away. The Polanski-Tate house was pulled down in the 1990s.

Killing Piggies

Sharon Tate, shortly before her death, with her husband, Roman Polanski.

The Family killed their first victim, Gary Hinman, on July 27, 1969. Hinman was actually a friend of the Family. Manson believed, incorrectly, that Hinman had inherited some money, so he demanded it for the use of the Family. Family members Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins held Hinman captive in his own house for two days. Even after Manson showed up and slashed him with a sword, Hinman continued to deny that he had any money. Manson then ordered Beausoleil to kill him and then hurriedly left. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death. He and the girls used Hinman’s blood to scrawl the words POLITICAL PIGGY on the wall and a Black Panther symbol to frame nonexistent black murderers.

On August 8 Manson ordered another follower, Tex Watson, to take Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian to the Polanski-Tate house at 10050 Cielo Drive. Kill anyone there, he told them, and make it as gruesome as they could manage. His loyal followers complied. They shot to death 18-year-old Steve Parent, who just happened to be leaving from a visit with the building’s caretaker. They then broke into the house and stabbed the eight-months-pregnant Sharon Tate to death, along with her three house guests: Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Jay Sebring. Roman Polanski was working in London at the time, and thus escaped. Before leaving the Family wrote PIG on the front door in Tate’s blood.

No Apocalypse

The Manson trial turned into a media circus. During the trial, few of the Family members displayed a drop of remorse for their sickening acts of brutality. Shown at right are (from left) murderers Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Susan Atkins mugging for the press as they are transported from prison to the courthouse.

The next night Manson led his group of killers, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian, now joined by Leslie Van Houten and Steve “Clem” Grogan, to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca—a supermarket executive and his wife—in Los Feliz. Manson stayed for the tying-up of the victims but again left before the stabbing started. And the stabbing was brutal—Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten slashed Rosemary at least 41 times after choking her with a lamp cord. After stabbing Leno to death, one of the killers carved the word WAR into his stomach. Before the band of killers left they wrote RISE and DEATH TO PIGS on the walls in blood, again hoping to implicate the Black Panthers.

A Persuasive Man

It is a common misconception that Charles Manson is a killer. In fact he has never killed anybody. He got his Family to do that for him.

Remote-Control Killers

Charles Manson, left, remains incarcerated in a California prison. All of the convicted Family members have been under consideration for parole, but in every case the parole boards have denied them release.

The police, media, and public did not fall for the ploy. No race war started and, by December 1969, all the murderous members of the Manson Family were under arrest.

Manson’s remote-controlled killers were Susan Atkins, Tex Watson, Bobby Beausoleil, Bruce Davis, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Clem Grogan. All seven of them were convicted and received death sentences, as did Manson. Mary Brunner and Linda Kasabian only acted as lookouts during the murders and later gave evidence against the others, thus escaping prosecution. The executions were all commuted to life-imprisonment, however, when California voted to abolish the death penalty in 1972. The convicted Family members all remain in jail, as of this writing.

Lake and Ng

(1983–1985)

When ex-Marine, ex-con Leonard Lake met Charles Ng, the son of a wealthy businessman from Hong Kong, he had finally found a partner for his delusional survivalist fantasies. But as well as building a bunker that would house them during the coming nuclear apocalypse, the pair built a torture chamber inside a remote Northern California ranch. There they videotaped themselves raping, torturing, and killing their victims. Most of the victims were young families, who had known the perverse pair before they were taken captive. No one knows the exact number of people who died at the hands of Lake and Ng, but estimates rise as high as 25.

Leonard Lake

Careless Shoplifter

On June 2, 1985, a security guard at South City Lumber in San Francisco observed a young man walking out of the store without paying for the bench vise that he took with him. The guard alerted a policeman, who caught up with the man just as he was putting the vise into the trunk of a car. As soon as he saw the police officer, the young man darted away and disappeared among the parked cars. An older, bearded man, who was bending over the open trunk, explained that it was all a mistake, and offered to pay for the vise.

The police officer insisted on making a routine search of the car and discovered a handgun with a silencer. Possession of this kind of weapon violated California state law, so the policeman told the bearded man that he would have to accompany him to the station. There the bearded man handed over his identification—which belonged to a 26-year-old man named Robin Stapley—and then asked for a glass of water. When it was handed to him, he popped a small capsule into his mouth and swallowed it down with the water. A moment later he slumped forward heavily onto the table. He had popped a cyanide capsule.

He died four days later without regaining consciousness. The Honda he was driving proved to be registered to a used car dealer called Paul Cosner, who had disappeared seven months earlier. A check with fingerprint records revealed that the name of the dead man was, in fact, Leonard Lake, a known burglar, 39 years of age.

The Torture Chamber

Papers found in Lake’s wallet led the police to a small ranch in Wilseyville, Calaveras County, about 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. There they discovered a bedroom equipped with chains, shackles, and hooks in the ceiling—it looked ominously like a torture chamber. In an underground bunker with prison cells, they discovered videotapes that showed young women being sexually abused by Leonard Lake and his partner, Charles Ng, the young man who had been caught shoplifting.

Better Days

Before Lake and Ng gave it a sinister new association, Calaveras County had been best known as the scene of Mark Twain’s first success, the story “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country.”

In a trench nearby, police unearthed the remains of eight human bodies. Fragments of bone found on the property and photographs from the ranch house brought the possible total of torture and murder victims to 24, including two very young children. It became clear that Lake and Ng had made a habit of luring people to the bungalow and killing them. The women were held as “sex slaves” and made to cater to the pair’s perverted sexual demands before they were murdered.

Harvey and Deborah Dubs pose for a portrait with their son, Sean. All three are believed to have been murdered by Lake and Ng.

Lake’s voluminous journals described the rapes and murders in detail. He wrote: “The perfect woman is totally controlled. A woman who does exactly what she is told to and nothing else. There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman. There are no frustrations—only pleasure and contentment.”

Lake proved to be a Vietnam veteran who was also a “survivalist”—that is, someone who is obsessed with the inevitability of World War III, and who makes elaborate preparations to survive it. This was the original purpose of the underground bunker. The picture that finally emerged was of a man who spent most of his life living in a world of fantasy, indulging in grandiose daydreams of success without any realistic attempt to put them into practice. He was also a man whose whole life had been dominated by sex—a man who, as a teenager, had obtained sexual favors from his sisters in exchange for protecting them from a delinquent younger brother—whom Lake later murdered.

Literary Inspiration

The journals also made it clear that the inspiration behind the kidnapping of the girls was a novel called The Collector by the British writer John Fowles, in which an art student named Miranda is kidnapped by a self-pitying and self-obsessed young man and dies in captivity. Lake labeled his scheme of kidnapping sex slaves “Project Miranda.”

The Accomplice Arrested

On July 6, 1985, police arrested Charles Ng in Calgary, Canada, for shoplifting again. A judge sentenced him to four and a half years in prison. He insisted that he had played no part in the killings in Wilseyville and that the murders had all been carried out by Lake alone.

Eventually California, which had reinstated its death penalty in 1977, extradited Ng from Canada, which has no death penalty. Ng was returned to Orange County, California, for one of the longest and most expensive trials in American legal history, costing $14 million. Ng was convicted on February 11, 1999, of 11 of the 12 murders with which he was charged (six men, three women, and two baby boys) and was sentenced to death. He is now on San Quentin’s death row, awaiting execution.

Ng, sitting in a Santa Ana, California, courtroom listens to the defense make its closing arguments in his multiple murder trial.