(1953–1982)
Donald Henry “Pee Wee” Gaskins Jr. has a strong claim on being the worst serial killer in modern times. A harmless-looking little man with a high voice, Gaskins enjoyed torturing his victims, mostly hitchhikers, to death—and his victim total is well over 100.
Wilton Earle, a writer, found Gaskins particularly interesting. Gaskins was in prison awaiting execution for killing a number of “business associates,” people involved with him in his car-theft racket. Earle wrote to ask him if he would like to collaborate on his autobiography. Gaskins invited Earle to visit him in prison, and in unsupervised conversations revealed that he was a sadistic killer who had often cooked and eaten part of his victims—sometimes while they were still alive.
Pee Wee Gaskins
Development of a Sadist
After his capture Pee Wee Gaskins agreed to show the law where he’d buried some of the bodies. At right, Gaskins, in handcuffs, directs officers to a spot in Florence County near Johnsonville, South Carolina.
Born in the backwoods of South Carolina in 1933, Gaskins was sent to reform school for burglary when he was a teenager. There 20 youths gang-raped him. Later, after another prison sentence for raping an underage girl, he resolved to kill any woman he raped. The first time he did this he was so carried away by the sensation of power that he began doing it regularly.
When Gaskins was arrested on November 14, 1975—charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor—it was for suspected involvement in the disappearance and murder of 13-year-old Kim Ghelkins.
On May 24, 1976, Gaskins went on trial in the Florence County Courthouse, was found guilty, and was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Successful plea-bargaining commuted this to a life sentence.
Murder in a Prison Cell
In late 1980 prison contacts of a man named Tony Cimo approached Gaskins, asking him if he would murder a fellow prisoner, Rudolph Tyner. Tyner, a 24-year-old drug-addict, had killed an old couple in the course of robbery. Cimo was their son. Bored and frustrated, Gaskins rose to the challenge of committing a murder under the nose of the prison guards.
The plan was brilliant in its ingenuity. Gaskins suggested that he and Tyner install a homemade telephone between their cells, running it through a heating duct. Tyner’s phone contained plastic explosives. When, at a prearranged time, Tyner said “Over to you,” Gaskins plugged his end of the wire into an electric socket, and the explosion rocked the whole cell block. It blew Tyner to pieces.
Soon Tony Cimo was arrested, and he confessed everything. He and Gaskins stood trial for the murder of Rudolph Tyner. Cimo received eight years. Gaskins was sentenced to the electric chair.
Final Truth
Most of Gaskins’s victims were hitchhikers who were unlucky enough to accept a ride with the ruthless killer.
When Wilton Earle, who felt that Gaskins’s story might be worth telling, approached him in 1990, Gaskins cautiously agreed. Gaskins agreed to tell Earle what he called “the final truth.” Earle did not realize that he was about to hear the most appalling and terrifying story of serial murder in the history of twentieth-century crime.
Having served two terms for rape, Gaskins had vowed it would never happen again. His solution was simple: to kill his victims. Having raped and killed his first female hitchhiker with a knife, he discovered that torture and murder were becoming such an addiction that after a while, it made no difference whether the victim was male or female; it was the torture—and the sense of power—that gave the pleasure. In effect, he became a character out of one of the Marquis de Sade’s novels.
Gaskins estimated that in the six years between September 1969 and his arrest in November 1975, he committed between 80 and 90 “coastal kills,” an average of 14 a year. He distinguished these murders of hitchhikers picked up on the coast road from his “serious murders,” those committed for business or personal motives like revenge.
The End
A crowd gathered outside the prison to celebrate Gaskin’s execution.
Hours before his execution on September 6, 1991, Gaskins tried to commit suicide with a razor blade that he had swallowed the previous week, then regurgitated. He was found in time, and given 20 stitches. Soon after midnight, he walked into the execution chamber without help and sat in the chair. After his wrist and ankles had been strapped, a metal headpiece was placed on his skull, with a wet sponge inside it. Before the black hood was placed over his head, he gave a thumbs-up salute to his lawyer. Three men then pressed three buttons—so that none of them would be sure who had been responsible for the execution.
The lifeless body of Pee Wee Gaskins was handed over to his daughter, and was later cremated.
(1957–1959)
On Sunday, January 11, 1959, an old blue Chevrolet forced another car off a lonely country road in Virginia. A tall, thin young man stepped out of the Chevy, waving a revolver. He ordered the occupants of the other car—Carroll and Mildred Jackson and their two children, Susan, age 5, and Janet, 18 months old—into the trunk of his car, got back into the driver’s seat, and sped off.
A search for the Jacksons brought no result. Then another couple came forward to say that an old blue Chevrolet had also forced them off the road. A man had walked back toward their car, but they had quickly reversed and sped away.
Melvin Rees
Cruel Death
Two months after the Jacksons went missing, two men driving near Fredericksburg, Virginia, got stuck in the mud. Wanting to get some traction under the tires, they went in search of some dry sticks and brush. What they found was the decomposing body of a man laying in a ditch, a necktie binding his hands in front of him. Wasting no time the men got the car out of the mud and headed for a police station.
When police detectives inspected the body, which had a bullet wound in the head, they made another, grimmer discovery. A female baby lay beneath the man—with no apparent injuries. The pathologist who performed the postmortem determined that she had been tossed into the makeshift grave first and left to suffocate beneath the man. The bodies were those of Carroll and Janet Jackson.
Two months later, the bodies of Mildred and Susan Jackson were uncovered in Maryland. Mildred had been strangled with a stocking and Susan had been battered to death.
Anonymous Tip-Off
Five months after the murders of the Jackson family, in May 1959, the police received an anonymous tip-off that the murderer was a jazz musician named Melvin Rees, but police were unable to trace him. Early the following year a salesman named Glenn Moser went to the police, acknowledged that he was the author of the anonymous tip-off, and told them that he now had the suspect’s address: Melvin Rees was working in a music shop in Memphis, Arkansas.
Rees was arrested there, and soon after the army sergeant identified him as Margaret Harold’s shooter. A search of the home of Rees’s parents uncovered the revolver with which Carroll Jackson had been shot and a diary describing the abduction of the Jacksons and their murders. “Caught on a lonely road. . . . Drove to a select area and killed the husband and baby. Now the mother and daughter were all mine.” He described forcing Mildred Jackson to perform oral sex and then raping her repeatedly; the child was apparently also raped. (Full details have never been released.) He concluded: “I was her master.”
The diary also described the sex murders of four more girls in Maryland: Mary Shomette, 16; Ann Ryan, 14; Mary Fellers, 18; and Shelby Venables, 16. The first two were found near the University of Maryland during the time that Rees had attended classes there. The other two were removed from rivers in the area. Rees would later confirm killing Fellers and Venables.
Blood Music
A song composer, Grant S. McWilliams, wrote “Crimson Concerto,” based on his “favorite serial killer, Melvin Rees.”
Earlier Victim
Two years earlier, in June 1957, a man had approached a courting couple in a car near Annapolis, Maryland—an army sergeant and his girlfriend, Margaret Harold—and asked for a lift. During the ride the man pulled out a gun and demanded money; when Harold said: “Don’t give it to him,” the man shot her in the back of the head. The sergeant flung open the door and ran. When police found the car, they also found Harold’s body lying across the front seat without her dress; a police spokesperson described the killer as “a sexual degenerate.” Near the scene of the crime, the police discovered a deserted shack full of pornographic pictures.
Reprieve
Rees was tried for the murder of the Jackson family in the Spotsylvania County Courthouse, shown above.
Rees was tried and found guilty of the murder of Margaret Harold in Baltimore in February 1961. In September of that year he again faced a jury, this time in Spotsylvania, Virginia, for the murder of the Jackson family. He escaped the death penalty, however. He was still appealing when, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the death penalty.
Philosophy of Murder
A Benzadrine inhaler. Rees had used the stimulant Benzadrine the night before killing the Jackson family. Benzadrine, a potent amphetamine that has a euphoric stimulant effect, was once sold over the counter in inhaler form. In the 1940s and 1950s, many people abused the drug, cracking open the inhalers and swallowing the Benzadrine-soaked strip inside. In 1959 the FDA made Benzadrine a prescription drug in the United States.
On the night before the Jackson killings, Rees had been on a Benzedrine kick and in the course of a rambling argument had told Glenn Moser: “You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards make it right or wrong.” He had also explained that he wanted to experience everything: love, hate, life, death . . . When, after the murders, Moser asked him outright whether he was the killer, Rees disdained to lie; he simply refused to answer, leaving Moser to draw the self-evident conclusion.
There is not much known about Rees’s background, or what turned him into a serial killer. Yet based on other cases, we can state with a fair degree of confidence that parental affection was lacking in childhood, and that he was a lonely, introverted child who was not much liked by his classmates. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a case of a serial killer of whom this is not true.
(1960–1983)
Henry Lee Lucas was thought, for a number of years, to be the most prolific known serial killer on the planet. He was eventually believed to have been at least on a par with Pedro Lopez—the “Monster of the Andes,” who claimed to have killed 360 small girls. Yet subsequent evidence brought to light something perhaps even more shocking: that Lucas’s lies coupled with the incompetence of the Texas police had effectively allowed many other killers to escape justice.
Henry Lee Lucas
Bad Start
Born in 1937 in Blacksburg, Virginia, Lucas was the son of a prostitute and a railway worker who had lost both legs in an accident. His mother seems to have detested the child and treated him with sadistic cruelty, once causing brain damage when she struck him on the head with a piece of wood. His teacher, who charitably gave him hot meals, described him as one of the most impoverished and desperate hill children she had ever met. An accident led to the loss of one eye, so that he had to have it replaced with a glass one.
By the age of 15 Lucas was a juvenile delinquent, and was sent to a reformatory for breaking and entering. “I started stealing as soon as I could run fast,” he later bragged. He had also by this time committed his first murder: he attempted to rape a 17-year-old girl at a bus stop, then strangled her when she resisted. He escaped arrest.
Free-Range Victims
Ottis Toole. Toole and Lucas met at a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2008 police announced that they had identified Toole as the likely murderer of 6-year-old Adam Walsh. Adam’s abduction inspired his father, John Walsh, to become an advocate for victims of violent crime and the host of the TV show America’s Most Wanted.
In January 1960 he killed his mother during the course of a quarrel. He told arresting police officers that he was innocent of her death, putting her sudden collapse down to a heart attack. In fact she had been slashed to death with a knife—a fact Lucas could hardly have forgotten, and one that he must have known the police already knew. But automatic lying was also a habit with him.
He was sentenced to 40 years in prison, where he made several suicide attempts. He was recommended for parole after 10 years. In fact he seemed to have felt secure in prison and wanted to stay there; when paroled, he told the board that he would kill again.
After an unsuccessful marriage, he drifted through the South. In 1978 he met another drifter, Ottis Toole, a homosexual who fantasized about cannibalism. The two teamed up and set off on a murder spree with cavalier abandon. They kept the head of one murder victim in the trunk of their car for two days. “Killing someone is just like walking outdoors,” Lucas once mused. “If I wanted a victim I’d just go to get one.”
Enter Becky
Ottis Toole’s sister liked Lucas enough to appoint him the guardian of her two youngest children, Frieda Powell, 9, and her younger brother Frank.
A year or two later, Frieda—who hated her name and insisted on being called “Becky”—left her Florida home with Lucas and her uncle Ottis. Lucas then began having sex with the still-underage girl. Becky was present during a number of killings, although it seems unlikely that she actually participated directly. But she did apparently help bury the bodies.
When Becky was 13 she was caught and sent to a juvenile detention center in Florida; with the help of Lucas and Toole she escaped, and the three of them went on another killing spree.
One Murder Too Many
In 1982 Lucas was paid to look after 88-year-old Kate “Granny” Rich. Around this time Lucas and Becky had become members of a fundamentalist sect called House of Prayer in Stoneberg, Texas, and lived and worked there for several weeks. Under the influence of the religious teaching, Becky decided that she wanted to go back to Florida and finish her sentence in the reformatory. Lucas wanted her to stay but finally agreed to let her go. On the way to Florida they stopped to have sex in a field. Then they quarrelled, and when Becky suddenly slapped his face, Lucas stabbed her to death. He then dismembered her body and buried it.
It might seem surprising that for a man who had by that time killed dozens (by his own claim, hundreds) of people, this one extra betrayal and murder would have a shattering effect. But that is not to take into account the fragile humanity and emotional stability that seems to lurk in even the most monstrous serial killer.
Lucas deliberately had no feelings, other than negative and sexual, for most of his victims. He blanked any natural empathy for them, much as a diner makes a point of not regretting the premature death of the chicken he is eating. But Lucas had actually loved Becky, and her death struck him under his emotional armor. As far as Lucas was concerned, the murder of his lover was the beginning of the end.
Smug Confession
Police composite sketch of the woman known only as “Orange Socks”
Back in Texas at the House of Prayer, he took Granny Rich for a long drive and both drank cans of beer. Lucas became angry at her questions about Becky—so he stabbed her to death, raped her corpse, and hid it in a culvert.
Lucas was the chief suspect in Rich’s disappearance, but there was no evidence against him. In June 1983 Reuben Moore, head of the House of Prayer, reported to the police that Lucas owned a gun, a felony for an ex-convict. Lucas was arrested and in prison underwent a religious conversion that led him to confess to murdering Becky and Granny Rich. He then also confessed to a total of 360 murders.
Naturally the police used every available lead to confirm Lucas’s claims, and soon found convincing evidence that he had committed a number of his professed kills. These included the rape and murder of a woman in Jackson, Michigan; a West Virginia police officer; and of an unknown female hitchhiker known simply as “Orange Socks” because that was all she was wearing when police found her body and because that was all Lucas could remember about her (apart from relished details of her murder).
Since the legal definition of a serial killer is one who kills at least three persons over a protracted period of time with no direct reason to do so, Lucas was officially designated a serial killer. He was eventually sentenced to death for eleven murders; his accomplice Ottis Toole also received a death sentence.
Hand of Death
Henry Lucas later claimed that he was, at one time, a contract killer for an organization called Hand of Death; but this part of his story is, to say the least, unverified.
A History of Sex, Violence, and Lies
Lucas stands with state and local law enforcement officers at the site of a double homicide in San Luis Obispo County during a 4,000-mile tour of California. Lucas claimed that he and Ottis Toole abducted two little girls and murdered them under this bridge, located seven miles north of San Miguel.
From the first murder, at the age of 15, Lucas killed anyone who resisted him. He was a high-dominance, highly sexed male, with an extremely low rage point.
“Sex is one of my downfalls. I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. If I don’t, I don’t. I rape them; I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them.” He also admitted that he had skinned animals alive during his teens; torturing animals is a classic sign of a budding serial killer.
The murder of Becky Powell seems to have been a watershed for Lucas. It is obvious—from his confession—that he loved her in a way he had never loved anyone else. She was at once his wife, mistress, and daughter, the only person who had ever accepted him without criticism, who regarded him as a kind of god. Yet because of his fatal tendency to explode under pressure, he killed her.
After that he was not only on his own but also deprived of his main reason for living. The murder of Granny Rich—one of the few people who had ever treated him with any kindness at all—may have been a masochistic gesture of defiance and despair, as if impotently shaking his fist at the sky.
V.I.P.: Very Important Prisoner
Sheriff Jim Boutwell of Williamson County, Texas, who came to know Lucas well in prison, noted in 1985: “Henry Lee Lucas is helping write a new chapter in the history of law enforcement. . . . Henry’s confessions, and the subsequent investigations, have exposed the mobility of crime in the United States.” In fact it was the Lucas case more than any other that made America aware of the existence of the “free-ranging” serial killer.
Asked about the problems of interrogating Lucas, Boutwell replied: “You don’t interrogate him. . . . you talk with him just as a conversation. If at any time you indicate you disbelieve him . . . you’ll ruin your credibility with him.” Boutwell described a case in which a police officer had driven three thousand miles to interview Lucas and, even though he had been warned against it, called Lucas a liar within the first two minutes. The officer’s journey was wasted; Lucas immediately refused to hold any further “conversation” with him.
Lucas was allowed all kinds of privileges—as much coffee as he liked (he was a caffeine addict) and endless cigarettes. Asked whether this was not “babying” him, Boutwell again emphasized that this was the only way to get Lucas to cooperate—make sure he never felt like an “ordinary” prisoner.
Jogging His Memory
The Texas authorities quickly set up a Lucas Task Force and flew the killer from state to state to meet with local law enforcement officials who had unsolved murders on their books. Again and again Lucas gave convincing details of cases, and eventually the Lucas Task Force claimed to have “cleared up” 213 previously unsolved murders. It is for this reason that some crime books still list Lucas as the most prolific serial killer on record. Unfortunately, those books are wrong.
It seems now that Lucas made up many—some say most—of his confessions. The Texas authorities would give him details of a case before he met local law officers. This was doubtless done with the best of intentions—they believed that he had killed several hundred people and therefore was unlikely to remember key details of each murder. So they gave Lucas the files on each case to “jog his memory.”
If, in fact, Lucas had had nothing to do with the murder case he was being shown, he would nevertheless concoct a story, based on the file he had just perused. Since local police were not told that he had read their own files on the case, they would usually be convinced that he had knowledge that only the killer could have known. And thus yet another murder would have been “cleared up” and added to the Lucas roster.
Philosophy of Murder
A small crowd watches as the casket of Henry Lee Lucas is lowered into his grave Thursday, March 15, 2001, in Huntsville, Texas. Rather than death by execution, Lucas died of heart failure while still in prison.
But then Lucas later retracted most of his “confessions.” His reasons for originally giving them seem to have been three-fold. First, Lucas was given special privileges because the authorities so valued his stream of confessions. Second, Lucas took a malicious pleasure in misleading everyone. And third, he had the typical antisocial serial killer egotism that made him want to be known as “the most prolific murderer in the world.”
Subsequent investigation of Lucas’s movements over the years of his killing spree has shown conclusively that he could not have committed a large number of the murders originally ascribed to him. The fact is that nobody can be sure just who, or how many murders Henry Lee Lucas, Becky Powell, and Ottis Toole were involved in. And neither Toole or Lucas can help either. Ottis Toole died in prison of cirrhosis of the liver in 1996. Lucas escaped execution when George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, surprised just about everyone by commuting his death sentence to life imprisonment. But then Henry Lee Lucas died of heart failure in 2001—almost certainly brought on by all the extra coffee and cigarettes he had been given by the authorities over the years.
Estimates of the number killed by Lucas and Toole are now comparatively “low.” Indeed Texas Ranger Phil Ryan—who was involved in the investigation—gave 15 as the highest count for the three of them. That would mean that at least 198 of the cases “cleared up” by the Lucas Task Force were actually closed prematurely. And because the authorities indulged in this bogus clearing up of unsolved cases, many murder investigations were closed down, leaving the real killers free.
(1960s–1970s)
John Gerard Schaefer qualifies as one of the worst serial killers of the twentieth century. Although he was only convicted of killing two young women, crimes he committed while he still served as a deputy sheriff in Florida, he may have killed as many 30—or even more. In prison he turned his experience as a killer into horrific short stories that featured, in savage, sickening detail, the rape, torture, and murder of young women.
Gerard Schaefer
Teaching Them a Lesson
Nancy Trotter and Paula Sue Wells thought they were in safe hands when the “nice” deputy sheriff offered them a ride. Instead of a day at the beach on Hutchinson Island, Deputy Sheriff Schaefer took them into the woods and tied them to huge cypress trees, intending to torture them.
Criminologist Sondra London has described how, in 1964, when she was 17 and Schaefer 18, he became her first lover. When he confessed to her that he daydreamed of hanging women dressed only in their underwear, she broke off their engagement.
Later Schaefer developed a taste for abducting two girls together, so one could watch in terror as he killed the other. This is undoubtedly what he had in mind on July 22, 1972, when he drove two teenagers, Nancy Trotter, 17, and Paula Sue Wells, 18, to Hutchinson Island, south of Orlando, Florida. The girls had met Schaefer, a deputy sheriff in Broward County, the day before while they were hitchhiking, and he had offered to drive them to the beach.
Instead he took them into the woods and handcuffed them both. He forced Paula to stand on the giant roots of a cypress, where he tied her and made Nancy stand on the roots of another cypress, with a noose around her neck.
While Schaefer was terrorizing Paula, a call came in on his police radio. He had to leave but kept the girls tied to the trees. He intended to return. Luckily for Nancy and Paula they worked free of their bonds and ran from the woods—and straight to a police station to report the tale. When Schaefer arrived back at the woods to continue his torture, he found the girls gone. His plan had failed. He went home and rang the sheriff—his boss—and confessed. His intention, he explained, was to frighten the girls and make them realize that hitchhiking was dangerous.
The sheriff found his story suspicious and immediately dismissed Schaefer from the police force. The sheriff also charged him with assault and imprisonment. Schaefer was released on $15,000 bail, and ordered to appear for trial in November 1972.
More Victims
Two months later Schaefer introduced himself to Susan Place, 18, and her friend Georgia Jessup, 17. He went to Susan’s home with the girls and told her parents that they were going to the beach to “play some guitar.” Mrs. Place was suspicious of the guy—he was at least 10 years older than the girls—and noted down the license plate number of his blue Datsun. When neither girl returned home, Mrs. Place notified the police. The license plate had apparently been lifted from another car.
A month later, on October 23, 1972, two more teenaged girls vanished. Elsie Farmer and Mary Briscolini had set out to hitchhike and were never again seem alive. In January 1973 their skeletons were found in undergrowth near Fort Lauderdale.
Trapped by a License Plate
From 1938 to 1980 Florida license plates bore a prefix number that indicated the county of origin. Although the initial trace of the blue Datsun that Susan Place’s mother had seen the girls go off in came up empty, when Mrs. Place realized that she had written down the wrong prefix, the police were able to firmly identify the car as Schaefer’s.
In November 1972 Schaefer was sentenced to six months for kidnapping Paula and Nancy. While he was in jail, his luck ran out. As Susan Place’s mother was driving through Martin County, she noticed that all car license plates began with 42. The license number of the blue Datsun had started with a 4, and she wondered if she had the number wrong. When further research revealed that the owner of a blue Datsun, Gerard Schaefer, was in jail for assaulting two teenaged girls, she knew Schaefer had to be the abductor of Susan and Georgia.
Killer Fiction
Killer Fiction contained the sick fantasies of Gerard Schaefer.
A search of Schaefer’s home—where he lived with his mother—revealed various items that belonged to missing women and some extremely explicit pornography, written and illustrated by Schaefer himself, describing murder, rape, and acts of necrophilia.
Schaefer was sentenced to two life terms for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. The items found in Schaefer’s room convinced the police that he had killed at least 20 young women, as well as a child of 9. Later evidence suggested that even this could be less than half the total murders.
In February 1989 Sondra London addressed a letter to Schaefer in Florida State Prison. He replied effusively and soon had agreed to allow her to work on a book about him. She asked him if he still wrote porno-graphic stories, and he forwarded her some of his more recent efforts. Most of the stories have the same plot: he picks up a girl, they have sex, and he kills her sadistically, strangling, shooting, or disemboweling her. “She stared in wide-eyed fascination as the ropy coils of her own intestines slid out of her belly,” one of them recounts.
Sondra London wrote: “What is scary is the idea of the hideously deformed, shadowy monster lurking behind this nice, normal guy.” She decided to publish Schaefer’s “killer fiction” herself, deciding, “You do not have to like something to learn from it.” It appeared as a 70-page paperback.
Death Inside
Gerard Schaefer was murdered in his cell on December 3, 1995, stabbed by a fellow inmate.
(1960s–1990s)
In the summer of 1993, Fred and Rosemary West—a builder and his wife living in Gloucester, England—were accused of sexually assaulting a young woman. The charges were eventually dropped after the accuser refused to give evidence, but in the meantime the West’s children had been taken into foster care.
The children’s caregivers overheard them talking about their older sister, Heather, being “under the patio.” Questioned about this ominous phrase, the kids said that they had been told that Heather had been working in the midlands for the past five years, but that their parents would still occasionally threaten them with being “put under the patio with Heather . . .”
Fred West
One Leg Bone Too Many
A crowd gathers to watch as workers prepare to demolish the house owned by Fred and Rosemary West at 25 Cromwell Street.
When the police checked Heather West’s National Insurance number, they found that she had never claimed any state benefits or National Health care, despite supposedly leaving home at the tender age of 16. They applied for a warrant and entered 25 Cromwell Street to dig up the patio. When they found the dismembered skeleton of a young girl, they arrested Fred West.
Fred admitted to killing Heather in 1987, but insisted that his wife knew nothing about it. He admitted nothing else.
The investigation might have rested there, but then the scene-of-crime officers unearthed a third femur: there was more than one body under the patio. Confronted with this fresh evidence, Fred confessed to two more killings. He failed to mention the six other bodies—buried beneath his cellar and bathroom—in part because he didn’t want his beloved home damaged by more digging. Later, however, under the pressure of intense questioning, he admitted to these killings, plus an additional three victims buried in the countryside.
Common Bond
When Rose’s father once tried to persuade her to leave Fred, he noticed that a seemingly innocuous phrase from Fred clearly upset Rose terribly: Fred had implored Rose to stay with the words, “Come on, Rosie, you know what we’ve got between us . . .”
Ending Unwanted Relationships
In custody Fred told the police that he didn’t know the identity of each victim. The first three had been girlfriends. Then he killed his first wife and, later, her daughter by another man—then, of course, there was Heather. Several other victims had been lodgers at 25 Cromwell Street, but the others he had picked up hitchhiking or had simply abducted. Painstaking police investigation filled in the gaps in Fred’s confession, but it is by no means certain that he told the whole truth as to the number of his victims.
Fred’s first known victim was his girlfriend Anna McFall in 1967—he likely killed her because she was pregnant and pressuring him to marry her. He carefully dismembered her body and buried it and the fetus near the caravan they had been living in. He did not bury her fingers or toes, however, keeping them as keepsakes.
In summer 1971, Fred and his new girlfriend had Anne-Marie, his daughter with his first wife, Rena, and Rena’s 8-year-old daughter, Charmaine, living with them. It took a few months for Rena to ask where her eldest child was. When it became obvious she might go to the authorities, Fred got Rena drunk, strangled her, dismembered her, and buried her under his house.
Fred Goes Hunting
The happy couple: Fred and Rose
Fred’s live-in mistress was Rosemary Letts, soon to become Mrs. Rose West. By the time Rose moved in with him, Fred had developed the habit of raping, torturing, and killing strangers, but he never harmed her. Monster that he was, he genuinely loved his new wife.
In 1972 he killed Linda Gough and Lucy Partington, both 21—burying them beneath his new home at 25 Cromwell Street. Throughout the decade he continued killing: schoolgirl Carol Cooper in ’73; Juanita Mottand and Shirley Hubbard in ’75; Therese Siegenthaler—a Swiss hitchhiker he called “Tulip” because he thought she was Dutch—and Alison Chambers in ’77. In ’78 he killed 18-year-old Shirley Robinson, a lodger and lover heavily pregnant with his baby. He claimed to have given up murder until May 1987, when he killed Heather during a row.
Fred West hanged himself in his cell on New Year’s Day 1995, before he could be tried, but the horror was not yet over. As the police investigation continued, it became obvious that his insistence that Rose knew nothing about the murders was a lie.
The Loving Accomplice
A court artist’s sketch of defense barrister Richard Ferguson questioning his client, Rosemary West, during her trial
Testimony given by the six surviving West children and by friends and acquaintances clearly indicated that Rose West was fully involved in Fred’s sexual predations. Further evidence came from Caroline Raine, who reported being abducted and sexually assaulted by both Fred and Rose.
Then there was the circumstantial, yet damning fact that Charmaine had died while Fred was in prison for petty crimes. The most likely candidate for that murder? The then 17-year-old lover, Rose.
At the trial, held in October 1995, the prosecution claimed that Rose had helped in all 10 of the killings that had taken place since 1972. The jury agreed (although there remains some doubt as to whether Rose actually helped kill her own daughter Heather). She was sentenced to 10 life terms in jail.
(1967–1969)
On the evening of July 29, 1969, Michigan state trooper David Leik returned from a 12-day holiday to his home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his wife, Sandra, and their three young sons. The following morning Mrs. Leik carried a basket of clothes down to the washing machine in the basement and was mildly annoyed when she noticed a splotch of black paint on the concrete floor. Then she saw that a can of black spray paint had disappeared, along with some laundry detergent and a bottle of ammonia. Her husband remarked that only one person could have taken them: her nephew, John Norman Collins, a 22-year-old student at the University of Michigan, who had kept an eye on the house and fed the dog while they were away.
John Norman Collins
Hiding the Evidence
The telephone rang. It was a police station on Michigan Avenue. A Sergeant Walters asked if Leik could get over there immediately. The sergeant lost no time in explaining why he needed to see Leik so urgently.
“That nephew of yours, John Collins. He’s the prime suspect in these coed murders.”
Leik was incredulous; Collins was like a younger brother. Yet when Walters had outlined the strength of the evidence and mentioned that Collins had backed down from a lie detector test, the shaken Leik had to acknowledge that there was powerful evidence against his nephew. Collins really might be “the coed killer,” suspected of killing seven female students in the area over the past two years.
That night Leik went down to the basement and scraped off some of the black paint with a knife. Underneath was a stain that looked ominously like blood.
A Frenzied Killer
The first victim, 19-year-old Mary Fleszar, had been found near a deserted farmhouse in Ypsilanti on August 11, 1967. Her killer had stabbed her 30 times, obviously in a sadistic frenzy, and then hacked off her hands and feet. Fleszar had gone out for an evening walk on July 18 and never returned home. A neighbor had seen a well-built, good-looking young man driving an old blue-gray Chevrolet, trying to pick her up.
Joan Schell, 20, disappeared almost a year later. She had gone out to spend the night with a boyfriend in Ann Arbor but never arrived. Her body was found among weeds outside Ann Arbor and, like the other, had been stabbed repeatedly. This time two students thought they had seen her walking with John Norman Collins. Collins flatly denied this, insisting that he had been at home in Detroit that weekend.
Four days later, on March 25, the body of 16-year-old Maralynn Skelton was found in Ann Arbor, lying facedown among weeds with a branch jammed into her vagina. She had been brutally beaten to death. She had apparently been hitchhiking.
The youngest victim, 13-year-old Dawn Basom, was found on April 16, 1969, strangled with an electrical cord, her breasts slashed repeatedly. She was a junior high school student. She had also been found near a deserted farm near Ypsilanti.
On June 9, 1969, searchers found another body on a deserted farm, this time in Ann Arbor. Alice Elizabeth Kalom, a student from Kalamazoo, had been stabbed repeatedly and her throat cut. She had also been shot in the back of the head.
On July 27, 1969, a doctor and his wife found a naked young woman’s body in a wooded gully in Ann Arbor. It was Karen Sue Beineman, and she had been last seen alive four days earlier when, outside a wig maker’s shop, she had accepted a lift on a motorcycle from a good-looking young man. She had been brutally beaten, raped, and strangled. Her panties, stuffed into her vagina, contained human hair clippings.
At least the manager of the wig shop had gotten a good look at the guy on the bike.
The Vital Clue
Michigan State and Salinas, California, city officers investigate a house trailer found in Salinas, which Collins towed west and lived in for a while. It was located in an alley behind the home of the parents of his Michigan roommate, Andrew Manuel.
When David Leik found a dark stain underneath the black spray paint, he thought someone had tried to cover up a bloodstain. When technicians examined the stain, it was not blood, however, but varnish, which Leik had used to refinish his basement. Collins had mistaken it for blood, though, and sprayed over it.
The basement was also used for cutting the children’s hair, and the hair clippings were identical to those in the panties stuffed in Beineman’s vagina. The case against Collins was watertight. Collins sobbed when he learned of his mistake.
Reflection of the landmark water tower in the window of an Eastern Michigan University campus building. The killer was called both the Ypsilanti Killer and the Coed Killer because several of his victims were students at EMU in Ypsilanti. A couple of the other victims were students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Trial
Attorney Hale Saph, front left, escorts members of Collins’s family to his pre-trial hearing on August 7, 1969, in Ypsilanti.
The trial of John Collins for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman opened on June 22, 1970, and the hair evidence was crucial. He was found guilty and sentenced to life, meaning a minimum of 20 years. He is still in prison in Marquette, Michigan. To this day Collins maintains that he did not kill Beineman.
Muddying the Waters
The 1969 murder of 23-year-old University of Michigan law student Jane Mixer, originally attributed to Collins, was reopened as “cold case” in 2004, on the basis of DNA evidence from perspiration found on Mixer’s pantyhose. The DNA pointed to a man called Gary Leiterman. There was also evidence that Leiterman had given Mixer a lift on the evening of her murder. In 2005 a jury found Leiterman guilty, and he is at present serving life—while continuing to strongly protest his innocence.
(1970–1973)
At 8:24 AM on August 8, 1973, the voice of a young man came over the telephone at the Pasadena Police Department, just south of Houston, Texas: “I just killed a man . . .” The caller identified himself as Elmer Wayne Henley and said he was at 2020 Lamar Street.
A patrolman who went to the address found three frightened teenagers—two boys and a girl—outside; one of them identified himself as 17-year-old Wayne Henley and produced the .22-caliber pistol with which, he said, he had killed his friend Dean Corll. In the hallway of the house the body of a heavily built man lay face down with six bullet holes in the shoulder and back.
Dean Corll
Henley Tells His Tale
Wayne Henley, shown below, during a phone interview in 2008. He remains in prison for his role of accomplice to sadistic killer Dean Corll.
Henley’s story was that he and two friends, Rhonda Williams, 15, and Timothy Kerley, 16, had arrived at Corll’s house at three in the morning for a glue-sniffing party. Corll, who was homosexual, had been furious that Henley had brought a girl. “You spoiled everything,” he complained. The teenagers sniffed acrylic paint from a paper bag, and an hour later all three were unconscious on the floor. When Henley woke up, he was tied and handcuffed, and the angry Corll was threatening to kill him.
Corll finally agreed to let Henley go—on the condition that Henley rape and kill the girl, while Corll did the same to the boy. Henley accepted the terms. Back in the other room, Corll stripped the unconscious Timothy and handcuffed him, face down, to a plywood board, He then took off his own clothes. Henley said he tried to rape Rhonda, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead he grabbed the gun and went in to the other room, shouting, “Back off! Stop it!” Corll jumped up and taunted Henley, “Go on, kill me.” Henley fired repeatedly until Corll collapsed on the floor. He then released his semiconscious friends, who were unaware of what had been going on.
Wall-to-Wall Bodies
Under interrogation Henley told the police that he procured boys for Corll. He also reported Corll as saying he’d already killed a few boys and buried them in the boat shed.
Later Henley took the police to Southwest Boat Storage south of Houston. Two detectives began digging in Number 11—Corll’s stall. Six inches below the surface, they encountered something in clear plastic and found themselves looking into the face of a young boy, a rope embedded in his throat.
It was the first of 17 corpses to be uncovered in the shed. One detective described the boat shed as having “wall to wall bodies.”
Ten More
Workers take on the grim task of digging for bodies in Dean Corll’s rented boat shed.
Henley led detectives to a site near Lake Sam Rayburn, and they located four more bodies. Finally they went to the beach on High Island and dug up another six. The final total was 31.
Henley implicated another teen, David Owen Brooks, who had introduced him to Corll two years previously. Brooks explained that he had met Corll while he was in school. Corll had paid him $10 a time to allow him to commit “oral sodomy.” In 1970 he had walked into Corll’s apartment and found Corll naked, and two naked boys strapped to a board.
What gradually began to emerge was that both Henley and Brooks had been actively involved in the murders. Corll had offered to pay $200 each for the boys. Brooks or Henley would take boys along to Corll’s house, where they would be invited to join in drinking and glue sniffing until they were unconscious. Then Corll tied or handcuffed them to specially constructed wooden boards and sodomized them. Henley explained that Corll often kept them there for several days.
Asked if Corll had tortured the victims, Henley said, “It wasn’t really what you would call torture.” But he declined to describe what one would call it.
The Heights
Houston Heights, shown above shaded in green-blue, is known simply as “The Heights.” This neighborhood supplied Corll with most of his victims. Corll had a house in the suburb of Pasadena.
A majority of the victims came from a rundown part of the Heights area of Houston; two of them had been neighbors of Wayne Henley and had been taken by him to Corll’s house.
The first killing, according to Brooks, had taken place in 1970 when Corll was living in the area of Yorktown; it was probably a hitchhiking University of Houston student, Jeffrey Konen. Corll’s victims were almost exclusively between the ages of 13 to 17. On several occasions he killed two at a time, murdering James Glass and Danny Yates, in December 1970; two brothers, Donald and Jerry Waldrop, in January 1971; and Wally Simineaux and Richard Embree, in October 1972. The youngest victim was a 9-year-old boy who had lived opposite Corll’s apartment.
At the trial, which began in July 1974, Henley and Brooks were both sentenced to life imprisonment for their parts in the murders.
(1970s–1980s)
In April 1980 the rain-swollen river flowing through the Ecuadorian town of Ambato overflowed its banks and revealed the partially buried bodies of four missing prepubescent girls. Three days later the man now known as “the Monster of the Andes” tried to lure away the 11-year-old daughter of Carlina Poveda. The frantic mother caught up with her daughter, walking hand in hand with her abductor. She summoned some men to come and help her; they held López down until the police arrived.
The prisoner, 31-year-old Pedro Alonzo López, denied that he had anything to do with the murders. But a priest who posed as a fellow prisoner finally talked him into bragging about his crimes. Confronted with his own words, López decided to open the floodgates: he told police that over the past decade he had raped and killed about 360 little girls.
If true that makes López the most prolific living serial killer on record.
Pedro López
Seventh Son
López was the seventh son of a prostitute in Tolima, Colombia. At 8 years old he was thrown out of his house for fondling his sister. His mother took him on a bus to another town and left him there. That night a man found the crying child and promised to be a father to him; he took Pedro to an empty building and raped him.
The boy drifted to Bogotá, where he begged in the streets for 10 years. At 18 he was sent to prison for stealing a car. Four of his fellow inmates grabbed him and raped him. It took López two weeks to manufacture a knife; then he lured the rapists, one by one, into a dark cell and killed three of them. The fourth stumbled onto the bodies and fled, screaming. Just two years were added to López’s prison sentence, because the murders were an act of “self-defense.”
Saved by a Missionary
López, in custody in Ecuador, confessed to raping and murdering more than 300 young girls in Peru, Columbia, and Ecuador.
Once out of prison he began abducting and raping young girls, preferably under the age of 12. He would then strangle them and bury the bodies. They were mostly South American Indians, because the authorities would not pay much attention to their disappearances.
He was caught abducting a 9-year-old girl, and his captors, after torturing him, prepared to bury him alive. An American missionary intervened and took the bound rapist in her jeep to the nearest Peruvian police outpost. The police weren’t interested and sent him back across the border into Colombia, where he continued to murder children.
A Look of Innocence and Beauty
López’s method was always the same—to walk around markets until he saw a girl with “a certain look of innocence and beauty.” He would follow the girl, for days if necessary, until her mother left her alone. Then he would approach her and tell her that he had a present for her mother. He would lead her by the hand to the outskirts of the town.
If night fell while he did this, he would forcibly keep the child with him, trying to soothe her with promises and gentle words. He would wait for sunrise and then rape and simultaneously strangle her. He would only kill the children in daylight because he wanted to see the life drain from their eyes.
The Man of the Century
While López was explaining his life to American journalist Ron Laytner, he declared: ‘I cannot see the sky. This is wrong, for I am the Man of the Century. I will be famous in history.”
The Monster Set Free
Snow-capped Andean peaks can be seen from Tolima, Colombia, hometown of the man known as the Monster of the Andes.
López later lowered his claimed number of murders to 140. It is not known if this modest reappraisal contributed to the prison authorities’ decision to free him, on grounds of good behavior, in early 1999. His model behavior in prison did not, however, prevent the Ecuadorian government immediately deporting him to Colombia.
Political relations between Ecuador and Columbia had been very bad for a number of years. Instead of handing López over to the Colombian authorities to stand trial for his crimes in that country, the Ecuadorians are said to have simply taken López, at night, over the Colombian border and released him.
López is on record as saying that, if freed, he would return to his “mission” of raping and killing little girls. Victor Lascano, the governor of the Ambato Prison that held López for 20 years, is quoted as saying of the release: “God save the children. He is unreformed and totally remorseless. This whole nightmare may start again.”
Pedro López’s present whereabouts are unknown.
(1970s–2000s)
On January 15, 1974, 15-year-old Charles Otero, finished with school for the day, walked into his house in a peaceful suburb of Wichita, Kansas. Although nothing seemed odd at first, he felt his heart race. Something was very wrong. He headed to his parents’ bedroom—and was met with the horrific and heartbreaking sight of his parents, their wrists and ankles bound, sprawled dead in their bedroom. He raced to the neighbors, who rang the police. They found Charles’s 9-year-old brother, Joe, wearing a hood, dead in his bedroom. His 11-year-old sister, Josephine, was hanging from a pipe in the basement, wearing only a shirt and socks. The two other Otero children—teenagers Danny and Carmen—had fortunately been at school during the killing spree.
Dennis Rader
Possessed by a Monster
Members of the Otero family do their best to contain their emotions at the BTK trial.
In spite of semen traces, there had been no rape. It looked as if the killer was a sadist who gained pleasure from the act of strangulation. The killer had probably entered the Wichita, Kansas, home when Charlie’s father, the 38-year-old Joseph Otero, was taking the teenagers to school. The killer had tied up Julie, 34, and her two children, then waited for the father to return.
The police had no leads. But nine months later a tip to look in a certain book in the Wichita Public Library revealed a letter from the killer. In it he described in detail how he had killed the Otero family—and he promised more murders. He declared, “I find it hard to control myself,” and said he felt possessed by a monster. He called himself BTK—short for “blind, torture, kill.”
Three months later, 20-year-old Kathryn Bright and her 19-year-old brother Kevin came home soon after midday to find an intruder with a gun. He told them that he needed money to escape from the police. He tied up Kathryn, then took Kevin into the bedroom and tried to strangle him. When Kevin resisted, the assailant shot him in the head. Even though he was badly wounded, when Kevin heard sounds of distress from his sister, he dragged himself to her—only to take another bullet. Still, he managed to escape and went for help. Nevertheless Kathryn died at the hospital, from stab wounds in the stomach.
Stop-and-Start Killing Sprees
Detective Tim Relph of the Wichita Police gives testimony during Dennis Rader’s sentencing hearing. Wearing gloves, he holds up the nightgown worn by Nancy Fox the night she was killed.
The BTK slayings ceased for three years. The next victim was a 26-year-old mother of three, Shirley Vian, found strangled on her bed on March 17, 1977. Her three children, locked in the bathroom, had escaped through a tiny window—the killer later admitted that he had intended to kill them too.
Nine months later, on December 8, 1977, the BTK killer called the police and told them that a girl named Nancy Fox was dead. The police traced the call, but when they went to the location they found only a dangling public phone.
The next victim, 53-year-old widow Marine Hedge, disappeared from her home nearly eight years later, on April 27, 1985. After manually strangling her, the killer put her in the trunk of her car, took photographs of the body in various types of bondage, and then drove her to a ditch. Her disappearance was not at first attributed to the same killer. This was also true of his next victim, 28-year-old Vicki Wegerle. Claiming to be a telephone repairman, he gained entry to her house on September 16, 1986. He strangled her after holding her at gunpoint. Then he snapped photos of her.
Final Victim
The BTK killer gained entry to the house of his 11th and final victim, Delores Davis, 62, on January 19, 1991, by hurling a concrete block through her plate-glass window. He then told her that he was on the run and needed food and money. He handcuffed her, pretended he was leaving, and then returned and strangled her. He loaded her body into the trunk of her own car and then dumped it under a bridge.
For 13 years nothing further was heard from the killer. But on March 19, 2004, the newsroom of the Wichita Eagle received another letter from the man calling himself BTK, who claimed responsibility for the death of Vicki Wegerle. He enclosed a photograph of her driver’s license and photographs of her body.
Miscalculation
Unaware that electronic traces left on a floppy disk are traceable, Dennis Rader used one to send a message to the police.
After 11 subsequent communications, BTK made his mistake; he asked the police if he could send a message on a floppy disk, and on being assured (via a newspaper advertisement) that it would be acceptable, he sent one to a television station. Electronic traces on the disk indicated that it was last used in the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita by someone named Dennis. Police kept a man named Dennis Rader, 60, president of the church council, under observation and approached his daughter about giving a blood sample. The DNA proved to be the same as in the semen left at crime scenes, and on February 25, 2005, Rader was arrested and charged. He quickly confessed, reveling that women like Marine Hedge, who he’d killed in 1985, were his “projects.” He observed and stalked them for days or weeks before he struck.
The trial, from June 27 to August 19, 2005, ended with the expected guilty verdict, and Rader received 10 life sentences, which would last 175 years. He is serving them at the El Dorado Correctional Facility, Kansas.
(1972–1973)
The psychotic serial killer is a favorite monster of Hollywood slasher movies, but fortunately such people are in fact very rare. The violently mentally ill are usually more of a threat to themselves than to others . . . Herb Mullin was an exception to this rule.
Herbert Mullin was born on April 18, 1947, in Salinas, California. His mother was a devout Roman Catholic, and Mullin’s upbringing was oppressively religious. Otherwise he seems to have been a completely normal boy, and his high school class even voted him “most likely to succeed.” By 17 he had a girlfriend and a close male friend named Dean. Dean’s death in a motor accident in July 1965 seems to have marked the beginning of the schizophrenia that led Mullin to commit 13 murders.
Herb Mullin
Falling into Madness
By October 1969 Mullin was suffering from full-blown paranoid schizophrenia, hearing voices that told him to shave his head and burn his penis with a lighted cigarette. He had been smoking marijuana and taking LSD for a number of years, and this undoubtedly contributed to his mental derangement. Placed in an institution, he wrote dozens of letters to people he had never met, signing himself “a human sacrifice, Herb Mullin.” But, thanks largely to mental healthcare budget cuts, he was simply given antipsychotic drugs and discharged after one month.
In June 1971 he moved to San Francisco and lived in cheap hotels; when evicted from his hotel in September 1972, he returned home—still highly disturbed. He had begun receiving what he believed were telepathic messages, ordering him to kill.
Preventable Deaths
The foreman of the jury that eventually convicted Mullin was convinced that the California government’s closing of mental hospitals during the Reagan years directly resulted in the 13 murders. “I hold the state executive and the state legislative officers as responsible for these 10 lives as I do the defendant himself,” said the foreman.
Turning to God
On October 13, 1972, Mullin was driving along a deserted stretch of highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains when he saw an old man walking along. He stopped the car and asked the man to take a look at the engine. As the tramp bent over the car, Mullin hit him with a baseball bat, killing him. He left the body—later identified as Lawrence White—by the roadside and drove off.
On October 24 Herb picked up a Cabrillo College student Mary Guilfoyle. As they drove toward downtown Santa Cruz, he stabbed her in the heart with a hunting knife, killing her instantly. Then he took her to a deserted road and began cutting open the body with the knife, pulling out her internal organs. He left her to the vultures and drove off—her skeleton was found four months later. On November 2 he entered the confessional of Saint Mary’s Church, Los Gatos, and stabbed Father Henri Tomei to death. Herb had originally entered the church in the hope that religion would somehow prevent him from killing again, but he didn’t even get to confess before he killed the priest.
Satan Makes People Do . . . Things
One of Mullin’s victims was targeted because he had been the first to supply Mullin with marijuana and LSD. One of the medical experts at the trial contended that it was probably LSD that precipitated the murders.
Now the voices in Mullin’s head seemed to come from potential victims, begging him to kill them. In December 1972 he bought a gun. On January 25, 1973, he drove out to Branciforte Drive, looking for Jim Gianera, the man who, years before, had introduced him to marijuana. He now believed Gianera had deliberately set out to destroy his mind. He went to Gianera’s cabin, but 29-year-old Kathy Francis, the current resident, told him that Gianera no longer lived there. She gave him Gianera’s address in Santa Cruz. Mullin drove there and shot Gianera dead; then, as the dying man’s wife bent over him, he stabbed her in the back, then shot her with the gun.
He then returned to the cabin and killed Kathy Francis and her two sons, who were sleeping in the same bed.
On January 30 Mullin went to discuss his problems with a Lutheran minister in Santa Cruz, explaining obsessively, “Satan gets into people and makes them do things they don’t want to.”
On February 6 he was hiking aimlessly in the state park in Santa Cruz when he saw a makeshift tent. Mullin pulled out his revolver and shot the four teenage boys inside the tent in rapid succession. Their deaths brought the number of his victims up to 12.
Killing to Save Lives
Mullin argued that his murders were necessary to save the world from catastrophes like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, shown at left. He told a psychiatrist, “if [you] would prepare a chronology of the world’s wars and famines and compare it with a list of major earthquakes throughout history, [you] would see that when the death rate goes up, the number of earthquakes goes down.”
A few days later, on February 13, Mullin was preparing to deliver firewood to his parents’ house when the internal voices told him he had to kill someone. He stopped his station wagon, went up to an old man, Fred Perez, who was working in the garden, and shot him. A neighbor looking out of her window saw the station wagon driving away and Fred Perez lying face down. She called the police, and within minutes Mullin was under arrest.
At his trial Mullin explained his reasons for killing. He was convinced that he was averting natural disasters—like another San Francisco earthquake—and had saved thousands of lives. Murder, he said, decreases natural disasters.
The court found Mullin to be legally sane and guilty. He will become eligible for parole in the year 2020.
(1972–1978)
On March 21, 1978, a 27-year-old Chicagoan, Jeffrey Rignall, got into a conversation with a fat man who drove a sleek Oldsmobile and accepted an invitation to smoke a joint in his car. The man clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over Rignall’s face, drove him to a house, and spent several hours raping him and flogging him with whips. Rignall woke up at dawn by the lake in Lincoln Park. In the hospital doctors discovered that he was bleeding from the rectum and that the chloroform had permanently damaged his liver.
The police were slow to investigate the crime, so Rignall hired a car and spent days sitting near motorway entrances looking for the black Oldsmobile. Eventually his patience paid off; he saw the car, and noted the number.
John Wayne Gacy Jr.
A Well-Respected Man
Gacy often subdued his victims with chloroform, rendering them unconscious before he raped and killed them.
The black Oldsmobile proved to belong to businessman John Wayne Gacy Jr. But it was mid-July before the police, more or less accidentally, arrested Gacy on an unconnected misdemeanor charge. The Rignall abduction case was not pursued very rigorously, but even a cursory check of Gacy’s police records would have shown the police that he had previously been sentenced to 10 years in prison for sodomy. But Mr. Gacy, who denied everything, was a respected member of the community—the police did not to want to believe that he might be an abductor and rapist.
In fact he was both those things—and a sadistic serial killer.
A Good Job Offer
On December 11, 1978, Elizabeth Piest drove to the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois, to pick up her 15-year-old son, Robert; it was her birthday and she intended to have a party. She arrived at nine in the evening, and the boy asked her to wait a few minutes while he went to see a man about a summer job. Robert did not return. Elizabeth drove home to tell her husband, and they called the police to report his disappearance. The police investigated at the drugstore and noticed that the inside had been renovated recently. They inquired about the contractor, were told that his name was Gacy and that he could have been the man who had offered Robert Piest the job.
Eventually the police went to Gacy’s house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, Des Plaines, and questioned him further about Piest. They noticed an odd, unpleasant odor in the house. Finally, tracking the smell, they raised a trapdoor leading to a crawl space under the house. There was a heavy odor of decaying flesh, and they found rotting bodies and human bones.
Ran Out of Storage Space
Evidence technicians remove the remains of a body from Gacy’s house.
At the police station, Gacy admitted that he had killed 32 male teenagers—in the course of raping them—and said that 27 of them had been buried or disposed of in or around his house; the remaining five—including Robert Piest—had been disposed of in other ways (Piest had been dumped in the Des Plaines River).
Seven bodies and various parts of others were found in the crawl space. Eight more were quickly unearthed. Gacy’s house was demolished in search of more corpses; eventually, the remains of 28 were discovered—Gacy had lost count by one.
Keen to Succeed
John Wayne Gacy had been born on March 17, 1942, in Chicago. He went to business school, became a shoe salesman, and married a coworker whose parents owned a fried chicken business in Waterloo, Iowa. Gacy became a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was known as an affable man who badly wanted to be liked. What no one realized was that he had a secret gay sex life in which he was becoming increasingly predatory.
His married life ended with his imprisonment for attempted homosexual rape; his wife divorced him. In prison Gacy worked hard, avoided other gay prisoners, and obtained parole. In 1972 he married a second time and started in business as a building contractor. His wife found his violent tempers a strain. His sexual performance was also infrequent. And then there was the peculiar odor that hung about the house . . .
In 1976 they divorced.
Tasteless to the End
Gacy tried to plead insanity when he was tried for the murders, but this plea was rejected as ridiculous. During the trial Gacy callously joked that all he was really guilty of was “running a cemetery without a license.”
A Bachelor Life
Gacy became notorious as the “Killer Clown” because he threw block parties for his friends and neighbors, and donning makeup and a clown suit, he entertained the children as “Pogo.”
Gacy continued indefatigably to try to rise in the world and to impress people: when he became involved with the local Democrats, he had faux cards printed identifying himself as a precinct police captain.
He used the building business to contact young males. One of these was John Butkovich, who vanished on August 1, 1975—he may have been the first victim. He had quarreled with Gacy about pay.
Once Gacy was separated from his wife, there was nothing to stop him inviting young men to his house. Some of these—like a young male prostitute named Jaimie—he handcuffed and violently sodomized, but he allowed them to go—with payment. The boys who resisted—at least 33 of them, one as young as 9 years old—he murdered.
In 1980 John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to death and was executed in May 1994.
(1973–1978)
On January 31, 1974, a student at the University of Washington, in Seattle, Lynda Ann Healy, vanished from her room; her bed sheets were ominously bloodstained, suggesting that she had been struck violently on the head. There was an extensive search, but there was no sign of her.
In the following March, April, and May, three more female students vanished; in June, two more. On July 14 two young women vanished on the same day. It happened at a popular picnic spot, Lake Sammanish. A number of people saw a good-looking young man, with his arm in a sling, approach a girl named Janice Ott and ask her to help him lift a boat onto the roof of his car. She walked away with him and never returned. Later the same young man approached Denise Naslund; she also vanished. Witnesses overheard him introduce himself as “Ted.”
Ted Bundy
Gone to Utah
Police photo of items found in Bundy’s VW, including an ice pick, crowbar, ski mask, handcuffs, and an assortment of binding materials.
In October 1974 the abductions (and presumed killings) shifted to Salt Lake City; three young women disappeared. In November the police had their first break in the case: a young man claiming to be a detective stopped 18-year-old Carol DaRonch in a shopping center. The “office” told DaRonch that there had been an attempt to break into her car; she agreed to accompany him to headquarters to view a suspect. In his car he snapped a handcuff on her wrist and pointed a gun at her head; she fought and screamed, pulled her hand out of the cuff, and managed to jump from the car. She described her abductor to the police.
That evening 17-year-old Debra Kent vanished on her way to meet her brother. Investigators found a handcuff key near the place from which she had evidently been taken.
In January, March, April, July, and August 1975, five more girls vanished in Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. On August 15, 1975, as a police car cruised along a dark Salt Lake City street, a parked Volkswagen Bug launched into motion; the cruiser motioned for it to pull over, but the VW accelerated. The police caught up with the car at a service station. In the vehicle with the driver, 29-year-old Ted Bundy, were a pantyhose mask, a crowbar, an ice pick, and various other tools; there was also a pair of handcuffs. It did not take long to link Bundy to the Utah disappearances. But, without any bodies, no murder charges could be brought against him.
When found guilty of kidnapping, Bundy sobbed and pleaded not to be sent to prison. The judge gave him 1 to 15 years.
Escaped!
A young woman peers through the drapes of a second-story window of the Chi Omega sorority house just hours after the press learned of the campus attacks. The inset above shows the two murdered women, Lisa Levy, left, and Margaret Bowman, right.
The Colorado authorities next charged Bundy with the murder of Caryn Campbell, who had been abducted from a ski resort in which a witness had spotted Bundy. But on December 30, 1977, Bundy escaped from custody, using a hacksaw blade to cut through an imperfectly welded steel plate above the light fixture in his holding cell.
On January 15, 1978, a man broke into the Chi Omega sorority house of the Florida State University in Tallahassee and attacked four girls with a club, knocking all of them unconscious. He raped Lisa Levy and strangled her with her pantyhose; Margaret Bowman died on her way to the hospital. One of Levy’s nipples was nearly bitten off, and she had a bite mark on her left buttock. An hour and a half later, a student woke up in another sorority house when she heard banging next door and a girl whimpering. She dialed the number of the room, and as the telephone rang, someone could be heard running out. Cheryl Thomas was found lying in bed, her skull fractured. But she was still alive.
The Last Victim
Carol DaRonch of Utah lived to testify against Bundy. At right, she is shown at a presentencing hearing in Miami, Florida, after Bundy’s conviction in the murder of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman at the Chi Omega sorority.
On February 7, 1978, 12-year-old Kimberley Leach walked out of her classroom in Lake City, Florida, and vanished.
At 4:00 AM on February 15 a police patrolman noticed an orange VW driving suspiciously slowly and radioed for a check on its plate number; the license plate proved to be stolen from Tallahassee. After a struggle and a chase, during which Bundy tried to kill the policeman, the officer recaptured Bundy.
A jury convicted Bundy of the Chi Omega sorority house killings, and the judge sentenced him to die. After a decade of appeals, the courts turned down the last one, and the date of execution was fixed. Bundy then made one more last-minute attempt to save his life by offering to bargain murder confessions for a reprieve. In fact Bundy went on to confess to eight Washington murders and then to a dozen others. Finally, when it was clear that there was no chance of further delay, he confessed to the Chi Omega killings, admitting that he had been peeping through the window at girls undressing, until he was carried away by desire, entered the building, and attacked them.
Fried
At 7:00 AM on January 24, 1989, Bundy was led into the execution chamber at Starke State prison, Florida; behind Plexiglas, an invited audience of 48 people sat waiting. As two guards attached his hands to the arms of the electric chair, Bundy recognized his attorney among the crowd; he smiled and nodded. Then straps were placed around his chest and over his mouth; the metal cap with electrodes was fastened onto his head with screws and his face was covered with a black hood.
At 7:07 AM the executioner threw the switch. Bundy’s body went stiff and rose fractionally from the chair. One minute later, as the power was switched off, the body fell back into the chair. A doctor felt his pulse and pronounced him dead. Outside the prison, a mob carrying FRY BUNDY! banners cheered as the execution was announced.
Nobody knows how many women Bundy killed. Estimates range from his confessed 30 victims to nearly 100.
The World’s Worst Serial Killer
(1975–1998)
In September 1998, police arrested Manchester GP Harold Frederick Shipman on suspicion of murder. At the time, even investigators found it hard to believe that this pleasant-mannered man, with a practice of more than 3,000 patients, could be a killer. But as the evidence mounted, they began to suspect that he was actually the most ruthless killer in British history.
Born in Nottingham in 1946, Shipman had struggled out of his dull, working-class background to get into Leeds University Medical School. Sadly he was a less than brilliant student. Throughout most of his time at medical school he remained a loner, without close friends and without even one girlfriend. Unfortunately, despite these inadequacies, he also had an extraordinarily high—some might say delusional—opinion of his abilities. He seems to have had dreams of being a famous physician, and each social and academic failure was like salt in the wound of his blocked ambition.
Dr. Harold Shipman
The Respected Senior GP
His first professional appointment as a general practitioner came in March 1974, in the small town of Todmorden, in the Pennines. It was here that Harold Shipman turned into a serial killer. At least one man in Todmorden, the husband of Eva Lyons—who was dying of cancer—believed that Shipman injected his elderly wife with an overdose of morphine as a “mercy killing.” Soon thereafter eight more elderly patients were found dead after Shipman had been to see them.
Dr. Shipman’s above-average patient death rate was eventually noted by one of his colleagues, Dr. Linda Reynolds. By 1997 she had realized that Shipman seemed to have been present at the deaths of an unusually high number of patients—three times as many as might have been expected—and reported her suspicions to the local coroner. But her report came to nothing.
Shipman first came under real suspicion after the sudden death of an elderly patient named Kathleen Grundy, on June 24, 1998. Mrs. Grundy had left a will in which her considerable fortune—over £300,000—was left to her doctor, Harold Shipman. The will was carelessly typed, and the two witnesses who had signed it would later explain that they had done so as a favor to Dr. Shipman.
Digging Up the Past
Sisters Sal Freeman, right, and Jude Lang hold photos of their mother Margaret Waldron, who died two days after visiting Dr. Shipman’s office.
It was not until autumn 1998, when Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed, that the authorities felt there was enough evidence to finally act against Dr. Shipman: the postmortem clearly showed that Mrs. Grundy had died of an overdose of injected morphine. After that another 14 exhumations of Shipman’s patients revealed the same thing. Moreover it was clear that these 15 were only a small proportion of those he had murdered.
When he was questioned on suspicion of 15 murders, Shipman angrily denied any wrong-doing. He was sure that he had covered his trail so carefully that he was safe, but the investigators soon discovered that he had made extensive changes to his patients’ records, after their deaths, to make them seem more ill than they actually had been. He was almost certainly unaware that the computer automatically registered the date and time of every one of the changes.
On October 7, 1998, Shipman was full of self-confidence when he was interviewed by the police and confronted with evidence of his crimes. But when a detective constable began to question him about changes he had made in the patients’ records, pointing out that many of them had been made within minutes of the death of the patient, he began to falter and flounder.
Yet there was no confession. From that moment onward, he simply refused to cooperate during interviews.
Too Many to Count
A court artist’s sketch of the trial of Dr. Harold Shipman, left, shows him standing before the presiding Judge Thayne Forbes, foreground.
Convicted, he was given 15 life sentences for murdering 15 of his elderly patients by injecting them with lethal doses of diamorphine (medical heroine). Yet a government report later concluded he possibly murdered between 215 and 260 people over the 23-year period of his general practice.
Shipman was found hanged in his cell on the morning of January 13, 2004. He never admitted to any of the murders. Since disinterment and effective forensic autopsies on as many as 260 bodies is practically impossible, there will never be an accurate account of his murders.
Why Harold Shipman became a murderer is difficult to comprehend. Unlike most serial killers, there seems to have been no sexual or sadistic element to Shipman’s murders. He killed most of his victims in their own homes, convincing them that he was giving them a normal, harmless drug injection; soothing them before administering the fatal dose. But these were definitely not mercy killings: although all his known victims were elderly, few were actually seriously ill or even in particular discomfort.
Given his character, it seems likely that Shipman simply enjoyed the God-like power of handing out death. His victims, like everyone else in his life, lived and died for the sole purpose of feeding his bloated ego.
(1977–1979)
In January 1979 two female students—Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder—disappeared from the small house they shared in Bellingham, Washington. The following day their bodies were found in the back of Karen’s car. Karen had confided to a friend that she had been offered some kind of “detective” job by a security guard named Kenneth Bianchi, who had recently moved to Bellingham from the Los Angeles area. In that area, between October 1977 and February 1978, a man who became known as the Hillside Strangler had raped and murdered 10 young women.
Composite sketch of the Hillside Strangler
The Victims
Twelve of the victims of the Hillside Stranglers. Top, from left: Yolanda Washington, Judith Ann Miller, Lissa Teresa Kastin, Jill Barcomb, Kathleen Robinson, and Kristina Weckler. Bottom, from left: Kimberly Diane Martin, Cynthia Lee Hudspeth, Jane King, Sonja Johnson, Lauren Rae Wagner, and Dollie Cepeda.
The first victim was Yolanda Washington, a Hollywood prostitute. Her naked corpse was found October 18, 1977, in the Forest Lawn Cemetery near the Ventura Freeway; she had been raped and then strangled with a piece of cloth. Two weeks later, on November 1, 1977, police found the body of 15-year-old Judy Miller, a runaway, in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angles. She had been raped vaginally and anally and then strangled. By the last weeks of November, around Thanksgiving, Los Angeles area police departments realized that they had an epidemic of sex murders on their hands; seven more strangled corpses were found, tossed casually on hillsides or by the road, as if thrown from a car. The youngest victims were 12- and 14-year-old schoolgirls; the oldest was a 28-year-old actress and scientology student Jane King. The last victim of the Thanksgiving “spree” was 18-year-old Lauren Wagner. Burn marks on her palms suggested that she had been tortured before death.
Panic
Los Angeles suffers about seven murders a day, but this series of sex murders between 1977 and 1978 had been something of a record. Los Angeles was in a state of panic.
The police had one important clue. Lauren Wagner had been abducted as she climbed out of her car in front of her parents’ home. A neighbor had looked out of her window and had heard Lauren shout: “You won’t get away with this.” She had then seen two men force the girl into a big, dark sedan with a white top and drive away. The woman had seen the men clearly; the older of the two had bushy hair and was “Latin-looking,” while the younger one was taller and had acne scars on his neck.
Two Stranglers
Angelo Buono in court
The clues led investigator to Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, who had been involved in procuring prostitutes. In court Bianchi confessed to murdering the two Bellingham girls, and admitted to five of the Hillside Strangler murders.
In later confessions Bianchi stated that his cousin Angelo had also been involved in the murders. He also succeeded in convincing a psychiatrist that he had a dual personality, whose “other self” killed the girls. The jury remained unconvinced, and he was sentenced to six life terms in prison at his trial in October 1979.
Murderous Duo
Kenneth Bianchi testifies before the court.
When Sergeant Frank Salerno, a detective on the Hillside Strangler task force, heard of Bianchi’s arrest, he hurried to Bellingham. Bianchi sounded like the tall, acne-scarred young man seen outside Lauren Wagner’s home, and his cousin Angelo Buono, who lived in Glendale, Los Angeles, sounded exactly like the other—the bushy-haired, “Latin-looking” man. Buono was a highly unsavory character. He had been married four times, but all his wives had left him because of his brutality—when one of them had refused him sex, he had sodomized her in front of their children. He had also been a pimp, forcing girls into sexual slavery—and Bianchi had been his partner.
The trial of Buono, which began in November 1981 and ended in November 1983, was the longest murder trial in U.S. history. When it came Bianchi’s turn to testify, it was obvious that he had no intention of standing by his plea-bargaining agreement; he was vague and contradictory. When Judge George pointed out that he could be returned to Washington‘s Walla Walla—a notoriously tough jail—he became suddenly more cooperative. Bianchi spent five months on the stand, and the murders were described in appalling detail. Buono was finally found guilty of seven of them. Buono received a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Bianchi was returned to Walla Walla to serve out his sentence.
Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002.
Murder by Proxy
In 1980 a crime writer named Veronica Compton volunteered to get Bianchi out of jail. She planned to stage a series of copycat murders made to look like they were committed by the Hillside Strangler. She would leave semen (as yet untraceable by DNA analysis)—provided by Bianchi in a condom—inside the victim. The first murder attempt went wrong when the victim fought back, and Compton landed in jail—for life.
(1978–1983)
On the evening of February 8, 1983, a drain maintenance engineer named Michael Cattran was asked to call at 23 Cranley Gardens, in Muswell Hill, North London, to find out why tenants had been unable to flush their toilets. It was a shoddy house, divided into flats. A tenant showed Cattran the manhole cover that led to the drainage system. When he removed it, he staggered back at the smell of decaying flesh. Closer inspection revealed a mass of whitish rotting meat . . . and some bones that resembled human fingers.
Dennis Nilsen
“Altogether”
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay, of Hornsey CID, was waiting in the hallway of the house when Dennis Nilsen walked in from his day at the office. Nilsen invited the policeman into his flat, and Jay’s face wrinkled at the stink of decaying flesh. He told Nilsen that they had found human remains in the drain and asked what had happened to the rest of the body.
“It’s in there, in two plastic bags,” said Nilsen, pointing to a wardrobe.
In the police car, the chief inspector asked Nilsen whether the remains came from one body or two. Nilsen said calmly, “There have been 15 or 16 altogether.”
At the police station, Nilsen—a tall man with metal-rimmed glasses—seemed eager to talk. He told police that he had murdered three men in the Cranley Gardens house—into which he moved in autumn 1981—and 12 or 13 at his previous address, 195 Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood.
The plastic bags from the Muswell Hill flat contained two severed heads and a skull from which the flesh had been stripped. The bathroom contained the whole lower half of a torso. The rest was in bags in the wardrobe and in a tea chest. Digging at Melrose Avenue revealed several human bones.
Lonely Guy
Dennis Nilsen later insisted that all the murders had been without sexual motivation—he just wanted the men to not leave him—a statement that led criminologist Brian Masters to entitle his book on the case Killing for Company.
Britain’s Biggest Mass Murderer
The self-confessed serial killer—he seemed to take a certain pride in being “Britain’s biggest mass murderer”—was Scottish, born in Fraserburgh on November 23, 1945. In the early 1970s he moved to London and became a job interviewer for the Manpower Services Commission. In November 1975 Nilsen began to share a North London flat—on Melrose Avenue—with a young man named David Gallichan. Then, in May 1977, Gallichan decided he could bear London no longer and accepted a job in the country. Nilsen was furious; he felt rejected and deserted. Gallichan’s departure triggered the homicidal violence that would claim 15 lives.
Stealing is Dishonest
Stephen Holmes
The killings began in December 1978. Nilsen picked up a young Irishman, Stephen Holmes, in Cricklewood Arms. They went back to his flat to continue drinking. Nilsen wanted him to stay over, but Holmes had other plans.
Nilsen took a necktie and strangled Holmes in his sleep. Then he undressed the body and carefully washed it, a ritual he observed in all his killings. He kept the body stuffed under the floorboards for nearly eight months. He then burned it in a bonfire at the bottom of the garden, burning some rubber at the same time to cover the stench.
The next murder victim was a 23-year-old Canadian called Kenneth James Ockendon, who had got into a conversation with Nilsen at a bar on December 3, 1979. They went back to Nilsen’s flat and listened to rock music on Nilsen’s hi-fi system. While Ockendon sat listening to music wearing earphones, Nilsen strangled him. Later, he dissected the body. Ockendon had a great deal of money in his clip, but Nilsen tore it up. His Scottish upbringing would not allow him to steal.
Muswell Hill
Nilsen proved to be an extremely cooperative prisoner once the police had discovered his crimes. In 2006 he even helped identify his earliest victim, whose family had never given up hope of finding.
In October 1981 Nilsen moved into an upstairs flat in Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill.
The next victim was John Howlett. He woke up as Nilsen tried to strangle him and fought back hard; Nilsen had to bang Howlett’s head against the headboard of the bed to subdue him. Then Nilsen drowned him in the bath. He hacked up the body and then boiled chunks in a large pot to make them easier to dispose of.
The last two victims were both unnamed; one was a drunk and the other a drug addict. Both were dissected, boiled, and flushed down the toilet. It was after the 15th murder that the tenants complained about blocked drains, and Nilsen was arrested.
The trial began on October 24, 1983. The jury found Nilsen guilty of multiple murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Cricklewood
Dennis Nilsen’s accounts of the murders are excruciatingly repetitive; he was certainly a mechanical madman.
The third victim, killed in May 1980, was a 16-year-old butcher, Martyn Duffey. Nilsen strangled him and placed him under the floorboards. Number four was a 16-year-old, Billy Sutherland—killed the same way as Duffey. Number five was an unnamed Mexican. Number six was an Irish building worker. Victim number seven was an undernourished vagrant picked up in a doorway. The next five victims, all unnamed, were killed equally casually between late 1980 and late 1981.
(1978–1990)
On December 24, 1978, the mutilated body of 9-year-old Lena Zakotnova was found in the Grushevka River, where it flows through the Russian mining city of Shakhty, near Rostov-on-Don. The corpse had been tied in a sack and dumped in the water some 48 hours before its discovery. Lena had been sexually assaulted and partially throttled, but multiple knife wounds to her lower torso had caused death. Lena had last been seen after leaving school on the afternoon of her death. A woman reported seeing a girl of Lena’s description talking to a middle-aged man at a nearby tram stop, and then they had walked away together.
The Shakhty police soon arrested a suspect. Aleksandr Kravchenko had been in prison for a similar murder in the Crimea. He was found guilty of Lena’s death and executed by a single shot in the back of the head in 1984. By that time, the real killer of Lena Zakotnova had murdered at least 16 other women and children.
Andrei Chikatilo
Raised in Hell
Shakhty, a mining town north of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, was home to Andrei Chikatilo and the site of many of his murders. He would lure victims from crowded places, such as train stations and bus depots.
Born on October 6, 1936, in the Ukrainian farm village of Yablochnoye Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was soon well acquainted with death. Joseph Stalin, in his drive to harden the peasantry, reduced Ukraine to chaos, starvation, and fear. Then the Nazis invaded and public executions became a regular event.
When he was 5 years old, Chikatilo’s mother told him about the disappearance of one of his cousins, seven years earlier. She believed he been stolen in the woods, butchered, and eaten. The gruesome story made a deep impression on the boy.
As an adult Chikatilo became a teacher. He married, but he found it difficult to perform sexually with his wife, partly because he was developing pedophiliac tendencies. He was shuffled from one Soviet school to another, always because he had been caught sexually abusing children. But the authorities, afraid of scandal, never fired him; they just moved him on with no warning to his new school.
In 1978 the Chikatilos and their two children were living in the town of Shakhty. Chikatilo bought an old shack in the slum end of town and began to invite down-and-out young women over, offering them food and vodka. There he would request them to perform sexual acts—usually fellatio—yet his real interest remained prepubescent children.
On December 22, 1978, he persuaded Lena Zakotnova to follow him to his shack. As he abused her he ruptured her hymen, and the sight of her blood threw him into a sexual frenzy. He pulled out a knife . . .
A Political Embarrassment
The Soviets reluctance to admit that they had a serial killer in their midst, meant that authorities did not distribute or post sketches such as the one shown above, drawn up from witness descriptions, of the man known as the Rostov Ripper. Warnings to the public might have saved innocent lives.
By summer 1983 the Rostov police department realized that they had a serial killer on their hands, but they couldn’t admit the fact: serial killers, every good Soviet citizen knew, were a side effect of decadent capitalist society. Such deviants were therefore impossible in the worker’s paradise of the USSR.
But more than a dozen murdered young victims had been found in woods and isolated stretches of parkland. Each had been killed with the same method: a slashing knife attack to the face and genitals. There was no sign of actual rape, but semen was found splattered on or near the bodies. There were also teeth marks, indicating attempts at cannibalism.
Eventually, in September 1983, a police team arrived from Moscow. It concluded that a single serial killer was indeed on the prowl and made suggestions on how best to reform the local investigation. Yet neither the Moscow police nor the local authorities took the key measure of informing the public. It was unthinkable that the Soviet Union admit that a serial killer was loose.
Unaware of the danger in their midst, both male and female children and teenagers around Rostov continued to be beguiled into following the nice, bespectacled, middle-aged man into secluded woodland . . . and he continued to brutally butcher them.
Rare Secretions
Chikatilo, shown above, maintained that he was insane, and during the trial he would constantly disrupt the proceedings by ranting and raving, sometimes to the point of nearly drowning out testimony.
The relentless horror continued until 1990. Chikatilo would have been arrested earlier if not for one striking fact: the blood type secreted in his semen was different from that in his veins. It was only when Japanese scientists discovered that this was possible—in very rare cases—that investigators put him back on their shortlist of suspects.
He was identified acting strangely near the scene of a murder and arrested. Under intense questioning, he admitted to total of 53 murders. He then confirmed his confession by leading investigators to a number of undiscovered bodies.
In 1992 he was put on trial, remaining in a specially constructed steel cage to protect him from attacks by the public. Aware that he was facing a death sentence if convicted, Chikatilo tried to secure an insanity plea by raving throughout the proceedings.
On October 14, as Chikatilo received individual death sentences for 52 murders, he filled the court with shrieks that often drowned the judge’s voice. But at one point Judge Akubzhanov showed unexpected agreement with one of Chikatilo’s arguments: he accepted that it was the Soviet Union’s refusal to acknowledge the high national level of crime that had contributed to Chikatilo’s long freedom from arrest.
Sixteen months later, on February 14, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was executed by a single shot in the back of the neck.
(1980s)
When the Secret Service arrested rapist and killer Mike DeBardeleben on May 25, 1983, it was not for murder or rape but for passing counterfeit bills.
In 1980 a counterfeiter dubbed the “Mall Passer” was regularly unloading fake $20 bills in shopping malls all over the United States. He had an ingenious method, handing them over in exchange for small items, like cigarettes and men’s socks, and taking the change. He drove far and wide; in one year, he traveled to 38 states and unloaded as much as $30,000 in fake bills.
Mike DeBardeleben
Hunt for the Mall Passer
For years Mike DeBardeleben made a success out of passing counterfeit bills in shopping malls all over the United States.
Police artists drew up sketches of the Mall Passer based on descriptions by store workers. On May 25, 1983, a bookstore clerk in West Knoxville, Tennessee, recognized the culprit and called the police. The man the clerk had fingered realized that he was being tailed and broke into a run. Soon he found himself cornered by two policemen, who had been summoned by radio.
Fingerprint identification revealed him to be James Mitchell DeBardeleben II. Police records showed that Mike, as he was known, had already spent two years in jail for passing dud $100 bills.
In DeBardeleben’s apartment, investigators discovered a Yellow Pages directory with a tiny slip of paper in the pages listing storage facilities. A visit to the facility nearest his home uncovered a great deal of pornography, including dozens of photographs of women in various stages of undress, many looking terrified and battered. A bag containing bloodied panties, a chain, handcuffs, a dildo, and lubricant suggested why the women looked so terrified—they had been tortured. Videotapes proved it. DeBardeleben enjoyed having women at his mercy—he forced them to say that they enjoyed the pain he was inflicting on them.
Pain and Power
In his study of DeBardeleben, Lethal Shadow, Stephen Michaud remarks that investigators concluded that he was “the most dangerous felon ever at large in America,” and added, “for Mike DeBardeleben, possession meant a live victim, suffering under his control.”
DeBardeleben himself once wrote, “There is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her.”
The reason for DeBardeleben’s misogyny emerged when investigators spoke to his previous wives. Apparently his relationship with his mother, Mary Lou (whom he called Moe), damaged the young DeBardeleben irreparably. Theirs was a twisted variation of the classic Freudian relationship. Mary Lou’s loveless childhood led to her cantankerous demeanor. She became an alcoholic, and was, partly, responsible for turning her son into a sociopath.
Rape
DeBardeleben liked to handcuff his victims so that he could easily subdue them.
In the early hours of Sunday, September 4, 1978, DeBardeleben passed a 19-year-old nurse who was walking home. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, gagged her, and blindfolded her with adhesive tape. Two hours later they stopped at a house and he took her indoors. He undressed her, leaving the blindfold in place, and then raped her for an hour without climaxing. He then sodomized her, ordering her to call him “Daddy.” After a nap, he drank root beer, smoked a cigarette, and forced her to fellate him.
Finally, he allowed her to dress, drove her to an isolated area, and released her.
Downfall
Sadist DeBardeleben could not resist videotaping his victims’ agony. His decision to hoard tapes and “souvenirs” ultimately led Secret Service investigators to realize that they had captured a criminal far more dangerous than a currency counterfeiter.
Incredibly, after his capture, it looked as if the authorities might be willing to forget all his criminal activities except the counterfeiting. Researching his criminal career, it was clear, would be a lengthy and costly exercise. Moreover the Secret Service’s responsibilities began and ended with the counterfeiting case. Agent Jane Vezeris, in charge of the investigation, was outraged by the idea, and went to see her boss, Acting Assistant Director Joe Carlos. She took with her a videotape in which DeBardeleben could be heard making various sadistic demands, while his victim screamed in anguish.
By chance, the director of the Secret Service, John R. Simpson, dropped in during the meeting and heard the tape. When it was over Simpson told Carlos: “Give them whatever they want.”
DeBardeleben was a narcissistic egomaniac, and his decision to act as his own defender at his trial directly led to his conviction. DeBardeleben’s major mistake came when he was cross-examining Lori Jensen, one of his victims.
“There were no overhead interior lights, were there?”
“No.”
“The only lights they had there were these little small ones next to the door at the bottom of the door, right?”
“Correct.”
Prosecutor Miliette would point out to the jury that DeBardeleben’s question revealed knowledge of the car that indicated ownership. The panel required just 38 minutes to convict.
This was his sixth and final trial, for the abduction and rape of Lori Jensen. In all he was sentenced to serve 375 years.
(1984–1985)
The Night Stalker was the nickname given to a serial killing burglar and rapist who terrorized Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. He would break into family homes, shoot the man of the house in the head with a .22-caliber pistol, and then rape and beat the wife or girlfriend. If he had time, the Night Stalker would also steal any valuable items he could find.
Throughout the spring and summer of that year there were multiple attacks traceable to the same sadistic murderer. Surviving victims gave consistent descriptions—tall, greasy-haired Hispanic man in his 20s, with bad teeth and terrible breath.
Richard Ramirez
Crime Wave
The first victim, 79-year-old Jennie Vincow, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her bed on June 28, 1984. Then on March 17, 1985, the killer approached Maria Hernandez, 22, as she parked her car outside her student condo. He fired a pistol into her face, but she raised her hand at the last moment and the bullet ricocheted off the keys in her palm. She survived, but her roommate, Dayle Okazaki, 34, was killed and her body sexually molested.
The killings then followed in fast order. On March 21 the Night Stalker carjacked and shot dead Tsia-Lian Yu. On March 27 he burgled the house of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara. Both were shot dead, but Maxine’s corpse was then hideously mutilated. On April 15 he struck again, this time shooting William Doi fatally and raping his wife, Lillian.
Between May and August the homicidal burglar attacked seven more times, killing six people and raping or severely beating others.
Love for Satan
Ramirez displays a pentagram symbol on his hand during his trial. He left satanic symbols at some of the murder scenes and forced several of his victims to “swear to Satan.”
By now the whole of Los Angeles was terrified by the Night Stalker’s one-man crime wave.
August of 1985 was the peak of the terror. It was clear that the killer was reaching a frenzy—as sometimes happens with serial killers. In that month he attacked four more homes, killing three people, attempting to kill six more, and raping two women.
The final victims were William Carnes and his fiancée. On August 24 the killer broke into their house and shot Carnes as he slept. He then dragged the terrified woman from the bed and bound her with neckties. He became so furious that he could find nothing worth stealing that he raped her twice, and then insisted that she swear her “love for Satan.” He made her repeat the ridiculous oath several times and then forced her to perform oral sex on him. He then laughed savagely and made his getaway. Luckily the woman managed to free herself and call an ambulance in time to save her fiancé’s life.
Violent Roots
Ramirez’s cousin Mike was a Vietnam War veteran who bragged to Richard about raping, torturing, and killing Vietnamese women—and he had photos to prove his claims. Mike eventually shot his wife in the face, killing her. The 14-year-old Richard witnessed the murder, standing close enough to be splashed with her blood.
“Evil”
Ramirez was sentenced to die, but appeals have kept him alive on death row in San Quentin, shown above.
Fortunately during an attack on August 21, a local youth managed to note the license plate of the killer’s getaway car. This stolen vehicle was found and recovered fingerprints allowed the police to match an identity: the Night Stalker’s actual name was Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez.
The 25-year-old Ramirez, known as Richard, was out of town when his name and photograph were printed on every newspaper front page in Los Angeles. As a result he blithely wandered into a liquor store on his return . . . and was recognized. Members of the public chased Ramirez before he could find a policeman, into whose protection he sobbingly surrendered himself.
Richard Ramirez was found guilty of 13 murders, as well as 30 other major crimes, such as rape and attempted murder. Asked by reporters about how he felt after the verdict, Ramirez replied, “Evil.”
After the death sentence was passed, the Night Stalker commented laconically: “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland.”
Decades of Waiting to Go to “Disneyland”
Ramirez and Lioy pose for their wedding portrait.
Since his conviction Ramirez has received fan mail from dozens of women, many enclosing sexual photographs of themselves. Most of these “followers” are probably like children who lean over the edge of a bear pit at a zoo—he’s caged, so they can play at titillating him. None, however, should have any illusions about what he would have done to them if it had been their house he broke into during his 1985 rampage.
Yet Ramirez gained at least one devoted and genuine friend—his wife. In October 1996 he married Doreen Lioy—a 41-year-old freelance magazine editor—in a secular ceremony in the San Quentin prison.
Afterwards Doreen said: “The facts of his case ultimately will confirm that Richard is a wrongly convicted man, and I believe fervently that his innocence will be proven to the world.” She is reputed to have sworn to kill herself on the day that Ramirez long-delayed execution is finally carried out.
(1989–1993)
In the gray light just after dawn on a morning in late June 1993, two New York State troopers patrolling Long Island’s Southern State Parkway noticed that a station wagon ahead of them lacked a license plate. They signaled it to stop, but instead it swerved off the freeway into the streets of Wantaugh. The troopers switched on their sirens and set off in pursuit in what turned into a high-speed chase. Five additional police cars joined the chase before the station wagon veered out of control and crashed into a telephone pole. The driver was the bespectacled 34-year-old Joel Rifkin. He claimed to have no explanation for his wild flight, but when the troopers noticed a foul order emanating from the car, they checked the back of the wagon. There, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the naked, decomposing corpse of a woman.
Joel Rifkin
Dumping the Bodies
The woman turned out to be a 22-year-old prostitute named Tiffany Bresciani, who had vanished three days earlier. Rifkin confessed to strangling her as they had intercourse. He then took the body home with him to East Meadow, Long Island, where he lived with his mother and sister.
In the summer heat, the corpse quickly began to decompose, so Rifkin decided to dump it among some bushes on rough ground near the local airport. Once he had confessed to the Bresciani murder, he decided to tell all. He in fact made a habit of picking up prostitutes and strangling them—17 in all (The police calculated the number as 18; they assumed that Rifkin had simply lost count.).
Inadequate
Rifkin was an unemployed landscape gardener, and he had been picking up prostitutes on an average of three times a week since he was 18. In his bedroom, police found plenty of “souvenirs” from the victims: ID cards, drivers’ licenses, credit cards, and piles of panties, bras, and stockings. In the garage, which reeked of decaying flesh, they found the panties of his last victim, Tiffany Bresciani.
The more investigators found out about Rifkin the more it became clear that—as with so many serial killers—he was basically an inadequate. An illegitimate child, he had been adopted a few weeks after his birth in January 1959 by a Jewish couple, Ben and Jeanne Rifkin, who also adopted a girl. Joel was backward at school; he mumbled, walked with hunched shoulders, and was dyslexic. His schoolfellows called him “turtle” and made fun of him. When he left home he tried various jobs, on one occasion working in a record store, but he was usually late, and would turn up with rumpled clothes and dirty fingernails.
Rifkin’s dream was to become a famous writer, and it could be argued that he had the right kind of preparation—a certain amount of childhood and adolescent frustration often seems to be good for writers. He holed up in his bedroom writing poetry, but a few half-hearted attempts at further education fell through. He simply had no ability to concentrate. A job as a landscape gardener was lackluster—he was so inefficient that he usually lost his customers within days.
Liar
After his arrest Rifkin told police investigators where to find more bodies. Above, they examine the remains of a body found near JFK Airport.
He was already in his late 20s when his stepfather was diagnosed with prostate cancer and committed suicide because he could not bear the pain. A shattered Jeanne Rifkin fell into a depression.
Not long after, Rifkin met an attractive blonde in a coffee shop; he was scribbling, and they began a casual conversation. She impressed him by telling him she was writing a film script. He told her—untruthfully—that he was a university student also writing a film script. When she took a small apartment, she even invited him to move in, to help her with her script. Rifkin saw this as the beginning of a love affair; she refused even to let him kiss her. A few weeks later, tired of his laziness and untidiness, she threw him out. After Rifkin’s arrest it was reported that she had worked as a streetwalker and was suffering from AIDS, although it is not clear whether he was aware of either of those facts.
Asking for Trouble
What is certain is that Rifkin began to kill prostitutes in 1989, picking them up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. One hooker with whom he had sex on two occasions said he seemed perfectly ordinary and normal and made no odd sexual demands. But many others turned him down—he looked and smelled peculiar. One of them refused when he asked for oral sex.
His habit of murder continued for almost five years. Many of the 18 dead women had been drug addicts. He may well have had sex with the corpses; he often took them home and kept them for days before he disposed of them. One body, tossed on landfill near John F. Kennedy Airport, was where he’d dumped it more than a year later, under a mattress. Other bodies were stuffed into metal drums and tossed in the East River.
Rifkin’s motivation has never been adequately explained. What is clear is that he was, like so many serial killers, an inept underachiever, a person who found life too much for him. As one of his schoolmates told a reporter, he was a lifelong loser. We can only assume that he killed because violence satisfied some long-held fantasy, and because it gave him a bizarre sense of achievement, a feeling that, in spite of a habit of failure, he was a “somebody,” a multiple killer, a man to be reckoned with.
Yet soon after his arrest, one of the policemen involved in the chase commented that he had probably wanted to get caught, because driving with a corpse in a car without license plates seems to be asking for trouble.
On May 9, 1994, Joel Rifkin was sentenced to 203 years.
(1989–1994)
On October 5, 1993, skeletons of two missing hitchhikers, James Gibson and Deborah Evrist, were found in the Belanglo State Forest, near Melbourne, Australia; they were both 19 and had vanished on December 30, 1989, after setting out from Melbourne.
Soon after the discovery police dogs found the decomposed body of Simone Schmidl, 20, a German woman who had vanished on January 20, 1991. Three days later the dogs found the bodies of two more German backpackers, Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and his traveling companion, Anja Habscheid, 20, who had vanished on December 26, 1991. Anja’s body had been decapitated, and the angle of the blow made it clear that she had been forced to kneel while the killer cut off her head.
Ivan Milat
Like a Loaf of Bread
German tourist Anja Habschied, 20, was backpacking through Australia with her boy-friend, 21-year-old Gabor Neugebauer. Nearly two years after they went missing their bodies were uncovered in shallow graves. Like other victims of Milat, each of them had been shot and strangled.
Six months later, a suspect emerged, when a coworker of a man named Ivan Milat reported that Milat had been heard saying “killing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread.” On May 22, 1994, police arrested the 50-year-old Milat in Eaglevale, a Sydney suburb.
In Milat’s garage, police found a bloodstained rope, a sleeping bag that proved to belong to Deborah Evrist, and a camera owned by another victim, Caroline Clarke, 22, who had vanished with her friend Joanne Walters in April 1992. Joanne had been stabbed 14 times in the chest and neck; the fact that she had not been shot suggested that there had been two murderers. Both girls had been raped.
Escape from Bill
Onions on his way into court to testify for the prosecution. The British backpacker was lucky enough to get away from the murderous Milat.
The New South Wales Police Department finally received the tip that they had been hoping for. A young Englishman from Birmingham, Paul Onions, called a police hotline after seeing a news report about the murders. Onions recounted that while he’d had been on holiday in Australia, a man matching Milat’s description had attacked him near the Belanglo State Forest. Onions had been hitchhiking from Sydney on January 25, 1990, when he had encountered a short, stocky man with a drooping mustache. The man asked the backpacker where he was heading and then offered him a lift in the direction of Melbourne.
The stranger introduced himself as Bill and said that he was Yugoslavian. As they passed Bowral, “Bill” slowed down. Asked why, he explained that he was trying to find a place where he could take an audiocassette player out of the trunk.
Some instinct told Onions to get out of the car at the same time as “Bill,” and this seemed to annoy his companion. “What are you doing out of the car?” he asked. Then suddenly “Bill” produced a black revolver, and the friendly manner vanished.
“You know what this is—a robbery.” The man then reached into the back seat and took out a bag containing lengths of rope. “That was enough,” said Onions later. “I decided to leg it.” He started running.
A bullet whizzed past his head. Milat caught up with Onions, and they began to wrestle at the side of the highway. Onions broke free and ran over the top of the hill. A Toyota was heading toward him, and Onions flung himself on the ground to force it to halt. He shouted, “Give me a lift, he’s got a gun.” The driver let him clamber into the back and drove him to the Bowral Police Station. Incredibly the Bowral police succeeded in losing the report.
Ivan the Terrible
In September 1992 a group of orienteers discovered a decaying corpse in the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales. The sign at the entrance of the forest cautions visitors to “please be careful.”
Cooperating with the Australian authorities, the Birmingham police lost no time in flying Onions to Sydney. There he identified Milat as the man who had fired his revolver at him. Milat had a long police record. In 1971 he had picked up two female hitchhikers. He had suddenly turned off the highway, produced a knife, and announced that if they didn’t have sex with him, he would kill them both. One of the girls was 18, and she allowed him to have sex with her on the front seat.
In 1979 he again gave a lift to two women near the Belanglo State Forest and suddenly pulled off the road. Upon realizing his intentions, the women managed to jump out of the car and hid in a ditch until he gave up his pursuit of them.
Milat’s trial began in the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney on March 25, 1996. The press dubbed him “Ivan the Terrible.”
Investigations exposed Milat as a control freak, whose chief pleasure came from seeing his victims terrified and helpless. It also became apparent that as he killed more and more victims, he also became more sadistic and enjoyed taking his time. At one murder site half a dozen cigarette butts were found. He paralyzed some of his female victims by stabbing them in the spine, so that he could sexually attack them at his leisure.
Milat was found guilty on July 27, 1996, and sentenced to life imprisonment on seven counts of murder.
(1989–1996)
For the people of Ukraine, the mass murders began on Christmas Eve 1995, in a small village called Garmarnia in central Ukraine. The killer entered the home of a forester, and killed the man, his wife, and their two sons with a sawed-off double-barreled hunting rifle. He stole a few items of jewelry and a bundle of clothes, then set the house on fire.
The murderer was labeled “the Terminator” (after the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie), and made a habit of killing whole families, including children. By the time of his arrest in April 1996, the Terminator had killed 40 people. Later he would confess to another 12 murders in an orgy of killing in 1989.
Anatoly Onoprienko
Death in the Ukraine
Five nights after the murders in Garmarnia, the Terminator headed to Bratkovychi, where he slaughtered another family of four—a young man, his wife, and her twin sisters. Again he stole a few items—gold jewelry and an old jacket—and set fire to the house.
During the next three months there were eight similar attacks in two villages; 28 people died and one woman was raped. In Enerhodar 7 people were killed. The killer returned to Bratkovychi on January 17, 1996, to kill a family of five. In Fastov, near Kiev, he murdered a family of four. In Olevsk, four women died. His usual method was to shoot the men, knife the women, and bludgeon the children to death.
The Arrest
Onoprienko, photographed in his prison cell on the day of his guilty verdict, raises his hands as he counts off the number of his victims.
There was panic, and an army division began to patrol the villages. Police mounted an intensive manhunt. Finally, in April 1996, the police received a tip-off about a man who visited the region to see a girlfriend, a woman with two children, who lived in Zhytomyr. More than 20 patrolmen and detectives assembled for the raid on the woman’s apartment.
The police who burst into the apartment on April 14 found a small, bald-headed man with piercing blue eyes. He made a grab for his case, but one of the policemen knocked him to the floor with the butt of his gun. In the case, police found the double-barreled sawed-off rifle.
The man was Anatoly Onoprienko, a 36-year-old former psychiatric patient, and he soon confessed to a total of 52 murders.
Onoprienko insisted that he felt nothing during the murders. “For me killing people is like ripping up a duvet,” he told British journalist Mark Franchetti, in his tiny prison cell in Zhytomyr, where his trial had been held. He told Franchetti that he had committed his first act of violence in his 20s, shooting a deer in the woods. He felt sorry and upset to see the dead animal but noted, “I never had that feeling again.”
The act of killing, he insisted, gave him no pleasure. On the contrary, he felt oddly detached from it. “I watched all this as an animal would stare at a sheep,” he told police in a 1997 videotaped confession. “I perceived it all as a kind of experiment. There can be no answer in this experiment to what you‘re trying to learn.” He said he felt like both perpetrator and spectator.
Waiting for Orders
The administration building in Zhytomyr. Onoprienko’s trial was held in this Ukraine city.
Onoprienko claimed some unknown force drove him, and voices ordered him to kill. “I’m not a maniac,” he told Franchetti. “I have been taken over by a higher force, something telepathic or cosmic.” But he had to wait for this force to give him orders. “For example, I wanted to kill my brother’s first wife, because I hated her. I really wanted to kill her, but I couldn’t, because I had to receive the order first. I waited for it, but it did not come.
“I am like a rabbit in a laboratory, a part of an experiment to prove that man is capable of murdering and learning to live with his crimes. It is to show that I can cope, that I can stand anything, forget anything.”
His trial began in Zhytomyr in late November 1998. At first the authorities could not afford to try him because of expense of prosecuting such a vast range of crimes. The trial was delayed. Eventually, after two years, his judges went on television to appeal for funds, and the Ukrainian government contributed the necessary £30,000 for the trial.
The Man in the Cage
The Beast of Ukraine was kept in a metal cage in the courtroom. Investigators uncovered the fact Onoprienko had spent three months in a Kiev psychiatric hospital, where he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. It was after his release that he had started his killing spree.
The trial ended four months later, on March 31, 1999, when Onoprienko was found guilty and sentenced to death. Because Ukraine is being considered for membership in the European Union, Onoprienko’s sentence has since been commuted to life imprisonment.
(1997)
It all started when a 28-year-old gay prostitute Andrew Cunanan began to suspect that he had contracted AIDS. He went for a blood test in early 1997 but could not bring himself to collect the results. After that date his friends began to notice that the usually humorous and effervescent Cunanan seemed increasingly depressed—perhaps because he assumed—incorrectly as it turned out—that he indeed had the fatal disease.
Another cause of depression was his jealous fear that two of his former boyfriends, Jeffrey Trail (a former Navy officer) and David Madson (a Minneapolis architect) were seeing each other behind his back. In an attempt to soothe his ex-lover’s suspicions, Madson invited Cunanan to fly from his home in San Diego to Minneapolis to meet with himself and Trail to talk matters over.
Andrew Cunanan
Target for Torture
The meeting, on April 27, 1997, in Madson’s apartment, proved stormy and ended with Cunanan grabbing a meat mallet from a kitchen drawer and beating in Jeff Trail’s skull.
It is a mystery just why David Madson—a respected and successful professional—helped Cunanan to roll Trail’s corpse in a rug and then go on the run with the killer, but he did. The mystery will remain forever unsolved because Cunanan shot Madson dead and left him in a roadside ditch several days later. Ironically Cunanan shot Madson with Trail’s revolver.
At this point Cunanan seems to have decided to live the life of a reckless outlaw and never made any particular effort to cover his tracks—even leaving photographs of himself in Madson’s Cherokee Jeep when he abandoned it in Danville, Illinois, a week after Trail’s murder.
He left no diaries or similar indication to his mental workings, so it is a matter of conjecture why Cunanan became a serial killer. His next killing, however, almost certainly stemmed from a sick urge to reenact a scene from one of the sadomasochistic pornographic videos he loved to watch (and had at least once “acted” in).
After abandoning Madson’s Jeep, he walked a few blocks and approached 72-year-old Chicago-based property developer Lee Miglin. Drawing his revolver, Cunanan forced Miglin into the garage of Miglin’s home and bound and gagged him with duct tape. Then, apparently re-creating a scene from a video called Target for Torture, he beat and kicked Miglin, stabbed him several times in the chest with a pair of pruning shears, and then slowly sawed the old man’s throat open with a hack saw. Cunanan then crushed the corpse to a pulp with Miglin’s own car—driving over it backward and forward several times. Then, after stealing some ornamental gold coins from the house, he simply drove off.
Killing a Good Samaritan
From left, Gianni Versace, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese, and Jeffrey Trail, all victims of Andrew Cunanan’s murder spree.
The Miglin murder, taking place as it did in a separate state from the first two killings, allowed the FBI to become involved in the case. They realized that they had a very unstable serial killer on the loose (Cunanan had killed the requisite three people to earn this categorization). The FBI issued a nationwide police alert, placing Cunanan at the top of the 10 Most Wanted list. Yet he avoided all attempts to catch him, either through incredible luck or, more likely, grotesque police bungling. Cunanan certainly wasn’t making much effort to avoid detection; he drove Miglin’s stolen, blood-spattered Lexus all the way to New Jersey before dumping it to steal a new vehicle.
To do this he murdered 45-year-old William Reese—a groundskeeper at the Finn’s Point Cemetery, near Pennsville, New Jersey. Cunanan arrived at the cemetery, abandoned the Lexus, approached Reese, and asked for an aspirin and a glass of water (both were found spilled next to the body). Following him into the groundskeeper’s lodge, Cunanan shot Reese dead and stole his Chevy pickup truck. Then he drove to Florida.
Celebrity Target
EMTs remove Cunanan’s covered body from the houseboat in which he killed himself.
It seems certain that Cunanan preplanned his next killing, that of the high-flying fashion designer Gianni Versace. At 50 Versace was at the top of his profession and counted international idols like Princess Diana among his closest friends.
For two months Cunanan wandered about Miami quite openly, keeping an eye on Versace’s favorite clubs and restaurants. The fact that the Miami police failed to pick Cunanan up in this time is a matter of considerable embarrassment to the department. As soon as Reese’s abandoned Chevy was found, it should have been clear that the killer might be at large in the city.
On the morning of July 15, 1997, Cunanan finally caught sight of Versace outside his Miami mansion. As the designer went to open the gate, Cunanan stepped up behind him and shot him twice in the head, killing him instantly. This was Cunanan’s last murder.
He went into hiding as hundreds of law officers and FBI agents flooded the city to hunt for him. Eight days after the Versace killing, he was discovered hiding in a luxury houseboat in Miami Beach by the boat’s caretaker. Before the police could capture him, however, Cunanan shot himself in the temple with Jeff Trail’s revolver.
Why Did He Do It?
Some investigators believed that Cunanan went on his killing spree because he thought he was dying of AIDS. While it remains uncertain just what it takes to turn a person into a serial killer, it is clear that fear of retribution is the main break that stops many borderline sadists from becoming habitual killers. Perhaps, with that break removed—thinking he had nothing left to lose—Cunanan gave into his dark temptations. He might never have become a serial killer if he had had the courage to collect the results of his blood test earlier in the year.
Inciting to Kill?
Can horror movies like Target for Torture turn people into serial killers? No. The sort of person who will eventually become a serial killer is highly likely to want to watch sadomasochistic movies, but a sadist with no access to such material may still become a serial killer—so blaming movies for inspiring serial crime is ove-simplistic.
