The Egoists
It was when Ressler was driving to his hometown of Chicago for Christmas 1978 that he heard on the radio about the discovery of bodies in a house in Des Plaines, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, close to his childhood home. He left his family with a relative and hastened to the crime scene. There he found a crowd swarming around the house that had been occupied by a building contractor, John Wayne Gacy. Among the police at the scene was a former classmate at Quantico, who quickly brought Ressler up to date on what was happening.
It seemed that police searching for a missing fifteen-year-old youth named Robert Piest, had heard that Piest had been to Gacy’s home to talk about a job, and then vanished.
On December 11, Elizabeth Piest drove to the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines to pick up her fifteen-year-old son, Robert; it was her birthday and she intended to throw a party. It was nine in the evening when she arrived, and the boy asked her to wait a few minutes while he went to see a man about a summer job that would pay $5 an hour. By 9:30, Robert had still not returned. She drove home to tell her husband and at 11:30 they rang the police to report his disappearance. The police investigated at the drug store, and noticed that the inside had been renovated recently; they inquired about the contractor, and were told that his name was Gacy, and that he could have been the man who had offered Robert the job.
The police already knew about John Wayne Gacy. On March 21, a twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan, Jeffrey Rignall, had entered into conversation with a fat man who drove a sleek Oldsmobile, and accepted an invitation to smoke a joint in the car. The man had clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over Rignall’s face, driven him to a house, and there spent several hours raping him and flogging him with whips. Rignall woke up in the dawn by the lake in Lincoln Park. In the hospital, it was discovered that he was bleeding from the rectum, and that the chloroform that had been repeatedly administered had permanently damaged his liver. The police said they were unable to help, since he knew so little about his molester, so Rignall hired a car and spent days sitting near motorway entrances looking for the black Oldsmobile.
Eventually, his patience paid off; he spotted the Oldsmobile, followed it, and noted the plate number. It proved to belong to John Gacy. But in spite of issuing an arrest warrant, the police still delayed. It was mid-July before they picked him up on a misdemeanor charge, but the case dragged on; the police felt that if Rignall had been chloroformed so much of the time, he might well be mistaken about Gacy.
Yet a check of Gacy’s background revealed that he had been sentenced to ten years in a “correctional institution” in Waterloo, Iowa, ten years earlier. The charges involved handcuffing an employee and trying to sodomize him, paying a youth to perform fellatio on him, and then hiring someone to beat up the same youth when he gave evidence against Gacy. At that period, Gacy had been married and managing a fried chicken business; he was apparently a highly regarded member of the community. He had been paroled after only eighteen months—described as a model prisoner—and placed on probation in Chicago. In 1971, he had been arrested for picking up a teenager and trying to force him to engage in sex. The boy failed to appear in court and the case was dismissed. Another man had accused Gacy of trying to force him to have sex at gunpoint in his house, and said that Gacy had boasted that he had already killed somebody.
The police now called at Gacy’s house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, Des Plaines, and questioned him about Robert Piest. When inside, they raised a trapdoor leading to a crawl space under the house. There was a heavy odor of decaying flesh, and the beam of the torch picked out bodies and human bones.
At the police station, Gacy admitted that he had killed thirty-three teenagers—in the course of forcing them to have sex with him—and said that twenty-nine of these had been buried or disposed of in or around his house; the remaining four—including Robert Piest—had been disposed of in other ways; Piest had been dumped in the Des Plaines River.
Seven bodies were found in the crawl space under the house, and various parts of others. In another crawl space in another part of the house, bodies were found covered with quicklime in trenches that had been dug for them. Eight more were quickly unearthed. Gacy’s house was demolished in the search for more corpses; eventually, the remains of twenty-eight were discovered—Gacy had lost count by one. When he had run out of burial space around his house, he had started dumping bodies in the river.
John Wayne Gacy was born March 17, 1942, in Chicago; his mother was Danish, his father Polish. He went to business college, became a shoe salesman, and married a coworker whose parents owned a fried chicken business in Waterloo, Iowa. He was a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was known as an affable man who badly wanted to be liked, and who tried to buy popularity with generosity. He was also known as a liar and a boaster—in short, a thoroughly unstable character. Married life came to an end with his imprisonment, and his wife divorced him. (They had a son and a daughter.) In prison, Gacy worked hard, avoided homosexuals, and obtained parole.
In 1972 he married a second time, and started in business as a contractor. But his new wife found his violent tempers a strain. His sexual performance was also inadequate. And then there was the peculiar odor that hung about the house . . .
In 1976 the couple divorced. Gacy continued indefatigably to try to rise in the world and to impress people—when he became involved with the local Democrats, he had cards printed identifying himself as a precinct captain. In 1978 he was photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
He used the contracting 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; Gacy was notoriously cheap, and refused to pay his employees for traveling time to the jobs. It was probably the stench of Butkovich’s decomposing corpse that filled the house during the last year of Gacy’s second marriage.
Greg Godzik came to work for Gacy in 1976; on December 11 he disappeared. A few weeks later, on January 20, 1977, a friend of Godzik’s, John Szyc, vanished; he also knew Gacy. There were many others. Billy Carrol disappeared on June 10, 1976, and in the previous month, three other boys, Randall Reffett, Samuel Stapleton, and Michael Bonnin vanished. Rick Johnston was dropped off by his mother at a rock concert on August 6, and was never seen again.
Once Gacy was separated from his second wife, there was nothing to stop him from inviting young men to his house. Some of these, such as a male prostitute named Jaimie, were handcuffed and violently sodomized, but allowed to leave—with payment. The boys who resisted were killed. A nine-year-old boy who was known as a procurer was driven off in the black Oldsmobile and never seen again. The Oldsmobile became familiar in the Newtown district of Chicago, where homosexuals could be picked up in bars or on the pavement. And the disappearances continued, until the killing of the thirty-third victim, Robert Piest, finally brought police with a search warrant to the house.
Ressler watched the development of the investigation with interest. On February 6, 1980, Gacy’s trial began in Chicago. His plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was rejected, and he was found guilty on March 13, and sentenced to death. Ressler then requested a meeting with him, and Gacy agreed to see him, together with some associates from the Behavioral Science Unit. He proved to be a short, pudgy man with a double chin and a moustache.
Gacy claimed to recognize him from childhood, when they had lived a few streets apart, and could not only recall delivering groceries to the Ressler home, but even some unusual flowerpots outside.
He was friendly and communicative, obviously feeling that he and Ressler were on an equal intellectual footing. He was convinced that the police, psychiatrists, and courts were fools who did not understand him. Ressler by now knew enough about interviewing serial killers to remain objective and not show any sign of disapproval.
He told Gacy he suspected that there had been far more victims than the thirty-three he was accused of killing—that since he had traveled widely in the United States, he could have “trawled the homosexual transient districts for victims anywhere.” Gacy neither admitted nor denied this.
His position was a strange one. Against all logic, he insisted that he was innocent. Moreover, he indignantly denied that he was homosexual. He talked contemptuously about “worthless little queers and punks.” As to why he had used boys for sex, Gacy explained that he had been a hard-working businessman who found is easier to seek out quick sex with a male—getting a woman into bed required wining and dining and “romancing” her.
Gacy’s view of himself was that he was a “nice guy,” helpful, decent, and heterosexual. But he was virtually a multiple personality, who had inside him another Gacy, “Bad Jack,” who committed murder and left Good John to dispose of the corpses. Dr. Marvyn Ziporyn, the psychiatrist at Gacy’s prison (and the author of a book on Richard Speck, Born to Raise Hell) read Gacy’s letters to various correspondents—Gacy was an indefatigable letter-writer—and wrote an analysis in which he said that Gacy was a classic sociopath, a man whose huge ego “exists solely to satisfy his own appetite . . .” His answer to the question “What is one allowed to do?” is “Whatever one can get away with.” His answer to “What is good?” was “Whatever is good for me.” He was also, Ziporyn said, a classic control freak, trying to control his correspondents even from the death cell. Certainly, like Gerard Shaefer and Dean Corll, he was also totally involved in his own ego.
In 1988, Ressler conducted a conference at Quantico, an International Homicide Symposium, in which both Kemper and Gacy agreed to appear on live-circuit television from their prison cells, and be interviewed by Ressler. Kemper was as frank as always, speaking in detail about his crimes and his motivations. Gacy, on the other hand, used his ninety minutes to insist on his innocence, and to try to persuade the watching law-enforcement officials to probe further into the case and uncover evidence that would lead to his release. Some of the audience later criticized Ressler for not “pinning Gacy to the wall” and forcing him to face up to his guilt. Ressler’s reply was that this would have served no real purpose, since his aim was to allow the audience to see the mind of a serial killer at work, and to see Gacy’s conviction of his innocence—in flat contraction to the facts—and his skill as a manipulator, one of the more frightening skills of many serial killers.
But how do we explain Gacy’s refusal to accept responsibility for the murders? Was he, as he claimed, a Jekyll and Hyde who was periodically taken over by the person he called “Bad Jack?” Ressler thinks not. In such killers, he argues, “the deadly side is always there, but the murderer is frequently successful in hiding it from the outside world.”
My own conviction is that the key lies in Gacy’s childhood. From a fairly early age it was clear that he had psychiatric problems, and that they linked to his father. John Stanley Gacy was a violent bully and an alcoholic. He was also a Right Man. “If my father said the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow you couldn’t disagree with him. He’d argue you into the ground.” His father was, it followed naturally, a violent man who beat the child regularly with a razor strop, and never lost an opportunity to tell the boy he was “dumb and stupid.” His father detested him for being sickly and weak, and not interested in “manly sports.” When the child was eleven he was struck on the head with a swing, and thereafter began to suffer from blackouts. Gacy senior said he was play-acting.
Certainly the number of sex killers who have suffered head injuries is so high that it is hard to deny the probable correlation. The following lists only some of the most prominent:
The “French Ripper,” Joseph Vacher, a tramp who raped and disemboweled victims of both sexes in the mid-1890s, had attempted to shoot himself through the head, permanently damaging one eye and paralyzing the right side of his face. It is not known what part of the brain he damaged, but after years in an asylum he was released and began his career of sex murder, killing eleven before he was caught and executed in 1898.
Fritz Haarmann, Hanover, Germany’s “cannibal killer,” suffered from a concussion after a fall from parallel bars during his army training in 1900; after a period in the hospital he was judged mentally deficient. After World War I, working as an unofficial police agent, he made a habit of picking up destitute youths at the railway station and taking them to his room. The murders were not apparently preplanned; sexual frenzy would carry him away, and Haarmann would either strangle his victims, or suffocate them by fixing his teeth in their windpipes. He cut up the bodies and sold them for meat. Haarmann was executed in 1925.
America’s “Gorilla Murderer” of the 1920s, Earle Nelson, was knocked down by a streetcar when he was ten years old. The fall gashed a hole in his temple, rendering him unconscious for six days, after which he suffered from recurring pain in the head and dizziness. After several periods in an asylum he escaped and began to roam the country, committing twenty-two sex murders between February 1926 and his capture in June 1927. He was hanged in January 1928.
Child-killer Albert Fish, who was born in 1870, began to suffer from severe headaches and dizzy spells, and also developed a stutter, after a fall from a cherry tree as a child. He committed his first murder—of a homosexual—in 1910, but had been raping small boys since 1895. He mutilated and tortured to death a mentally retarded boy in 1919, and between that time and his capture in December 1934 is believed to have committed fifteen more murders of children, one of whom (Grace Budd) he cooked and ate. He himself claimed to have committed four hundred murders.
Raymond Fernandez was perfectly normal until a falling hatch knocked him unconscious when he was at sea in December 1945. At thirty-one years of age, Fernandez suddenly turned into a sex maniac, contacting lonely women through advertisements in contact magazines, and seducing them—it made no difference whether they were young or old, fat or thin, beautiful or ugly; he even seduced one seriously disabled woman. He and his mistress Martha Beck became known as the “Lonely Hearts Killers” after murdering a number of women for their money, and were executed in 1951.
John Reginald Christie, the British sex killer of the 1940s and early 1950s, had been knocked down by a car when he first came to London, and was unconscious for several hours.
Richard Speck, who systematically and brutally slaughtered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on one July day in 1966, had suffered a number of head injuries as a child, but began having severe headaches and blackouts at the age of sixteen after a policeman had broken up a fight by beating him on the head several times with his club. Speck died in prison in 1991.
Gary Heidnik was tried in 1988 for keeping six women prisoner in his basement in Philadelphia and subjecting them to a four-month ordeal of rape and torture, during which he killed two of them, cooking parts of one of the corpses and feeding it to the other prisoners. Heidnik had been mentally abnormal since he fell out of a tree as a child, deforming the shape of his head so that his school-fellows called him “football head.”
Randy Kraft, a computer expert of Long Beach, California, was stopped on May 14, 1983, for careless driving, and was found to have the corpse of a young man propped up beside him in the passenger seat. A search of the car and his home revealed that he was the homosexual “Freeway Killer” who had been murdering and torturing young men since 1975 and dumping their bodies on the freeways. A list found in his car indicated that he had killed sixty-seven men. As a child, Kraft had fallen down a flight of concrete steps and been unconscious for several hours. He was sentenced to death in 1989.
Henry Lee Lucas (see chapter 11) was violently beaten by his drunken mother as a child, and on one occasion was unconscious for three days after she struck him on the head with a piece of wood.
Bobby Jo Long, received a fractured skull after a motorcycle accident when in the army, and remained in a coma for weeks. After this, he reported, he began thinking about sex all the time. From having sex with his wife two or three times a week he went to two or three times a day, also masturbating in between. He began committing rapes after he left the army, telephoning women who had placed classified advertisements, and if he found them alone, raping them. Then, in 1983, he changed suddenly from a rapist who left his victims alive to a sex murderer, killing nine women in the Tampa, Florida, area. After each murder he sank into a deep sleep, and when he woke up was never certain whether he had dreamed it all—he had to go out and buy a newspaper to find out. Finally, he was touched by the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been abused in childhood, and although he raped her, he let her go, knowing that it would lead to his arrest.
Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis examined Long and found that he had had more than one head injury—one after falling off a swing, one after being knocked down by a car. A PET scan showed that he had damage to the left temporal lobe, and an abnormality of the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with violence. She was inclined to believe that this was responsible for Long’s hyperactive sex drive. In spite of these discoveries, Long was sentenced to death.
The British serial killer Fred West (see chapter 16) had two serious injuries to his head, the first from a motorcycle crash that left him unconscious for a week, the second when a girl pushed him off a fire escape after he put his hand up her skirt—this time he was unconscious for two days.
At the time I write these words, Dennis Rader, the “BTK” (bind, torture, kill) killer, sought by the police for more than thirty years, has explained in an interview that he was dropped on his head as a child.
All this should make us aware that we should not dismiss the view that Gacy’s accident with the swing may explain a great deal that seems baffling about his crimes. He was interviewed in prison by psychologist Dr. Helen Morrison, who appeared for the defense to support his plea of insanity, and her account of him in her book My Life Among Serial Killers makes it obvious that by no stretch of the imagination could Gacy be described as sane. She notes that he would contradict himself, from sentence to sentence, and that he could change from reasonable behavior to rage and violence in a moment. Although Dr. Morrison was appearing in his defense, he could swing instantly from friendliness to fury, and shout that she was dumb and stupid. Gacy was a seething cauldron of violent emotions, only held together by his overwhelmingly high opinion of himself. Her prison interviews with him reads like a conversations with someone who is firmly convinced that he is Julius Caesar and is married to the queen of Sheba. It is not surprising that, after his conviction, he suddenly started declaring that he had never killed anybody, but had been framed by the police. It is also certain that, if he had taken a lie detector test, it would have registered that he was telling the truth.
When Gacy was asked by a friend of mine, Jeffrey Smalldon, what he thought of my entry on him in An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, he replied predictably: “Colin Wilson doesn’t understand me.”
On May 10, 1994, he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois. A crowd cheered as he was pronounced dead.
It later emerged that his execution had gone badly; the ingredients of the lethal injection had been mixed in a way that caused them to solidify, so he took a long time to die. There were even rumors that his execution had been deliberately bungled to prolong his discomfort.
The demonstrations at Gacy’s execution were reminiscent of the final scenes of another notorious serial killer of the 1970s, Ted Bundy, who also happens to be another textbook case of the “high-IQ killer.”
On January 31, 1974, a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Lynda Ann Healy, vanished from her room; the bloodstained bed sheets suggested that she had been struck violently on the head. During the following March, April, and May, three other female students vanished; in June, two more. In July, two young women vanished on the same day. It happened at a popular picnic spot, Lake Sammamish; a number of people witnessed a good-looking young man, with his arm in a sling, approach Janice Ott and ask her to help him lift a boat onto the roof of his car; she walked away with him and did not return. Later, Denise Naslund was accosted by the same young man; she also vanished. He had been heard to introduce himself as “Ted.”
In October 1974, the killings shifted to Salt Lake City; three young women disappeared in one month. That November, the police had their first break in the case: Carol DaRonch was accosted in a shopping center by a young man who identified himself as a detective, and informed her that there had been an attempt to break into her car. She agreed to accompany him to headquarters to view a suspect. In the car he snapped a handcuff on her wrist and pointed a gun at her head; she fought and screamed, and managed to jump out of the car. That same evening, a female student vanished on her way to meet her brother. A handcuff key was found near the place from which she had been taken.
Meanwhile, the Seattle police had fixed on a young man named Ted Bundy as a main suspect. For the past six years, he had been involved in a close relationship with divorcée Meg Anders, but she had called off their engagement when she realized that he was a habitual thief. After the Lake Sammamish disappearances, she had seen a composite drawing of the wanted “Ted” in the Seattle Times and thought it looked like Bundy; moreover, “Ted” drove a Volkswagen like Bundy’s. She had seen crutches and plaster of paris in Bundy’s room, and the coincidence seemed too great; with many misgivings, she telephoned the police. They assured her that they had already checked out Bundy; but at the suggestion of the Seattle police, Carol DaRonch was shown Bundy’s photograph. She tentatively identified it as resembling the man who had tried to abduct her, but was obviously far from sure. (Bundy had been sporting a beard at the time.)
With his good looks and easy charm, Ted Bundy, shown here in Pensacola in 1977, seemed an unlikely serial killer. Bundy was convicted of three Florida slayings, although authorities considered him a suspect in as many as thirty-six killings, mostly in the Northwest. (Associated Press)
In January, March, April, July, and August of 1975, more young women vanished in Colorado, and their bodies—or skeletons—found in remote spots. On August 16, 1975, Bundy was arrested for the first time. As a police car was driving along a dark street in Salt Lake City, a parked Volkswagen launched into sudden motion. Curious at its haste, the policeman followed, and it accelerated. He caught up with the car at a service station, and found inside the car a pantyhose mask, a crowbar, an ice pick, and various other tools; there was also a pair of handcuffs.
Bundy, twenty-nine, seemed an unlikely burglar. He was a graduate of the University of Washington, and was in Utah to study law; he had worked as a political campaigner and for the crime commission in Seattle. In his room there was nothing suspicious—except maps and brochures of Colorado, from which five young women had vanished that year. But strands of hair were found in the car, and they proved to be identical with those of Melissa Smith, daughter of the Midvale police chief, who had vanished the previous October.
Carol DaRonch had meanwhile identified Bundy in a police lineup as the fake policeman, and bloodstains on her clothes—where she had scratched her assailant—were of Bundy’s blood type. Credit card receipts showed that Bundy had been close to various places from which young women had vanished in Colorado.
In theory, this should have been the end of the case—and if it had been, it would have been regarded as a typical triumph of scientific detection, beginning with the composite drawing and concluding with the hair and blood evidence. The evidence was, admittedly, circumstantial, but taken all together, it formed a powerful case.
The central objection to it became apparent as soon as Bundy walked into court. He looked so obviously decent and clean-cut that most people felt that there must be some mistake. He was polite, well spoken, articulate, charming, the kind of man who could have found himself a girlfriend for each night of the week. Why should such a man be a sex killer? In spite of which, the impression he made was of brilliance and plausibility rather than innocence. For example, he insisted that he had driven away from the police car because he was smoking marijuana, and that he had thrown the joint out of the window.
The case seemed to be balanced on a knife-edge—nevertheless, the judge pronounced a sentence of guilty of kidnapping. Bundy sobbed and pleaded not to be sent to prison; the judge ignored his whimpering and imposed a sentence of between one and fifteen years jail time.
The Colorado authorities now charged him with the murder of Caryn Campbell, who had been abducted from a ski resort where a witness had seen Bundy. After a morning courtroom session in Aspen, Bundy succeeded in wandering into the library during the lunch recess, and jumped out of the window. He was recaptured eight days later, tired and hungry, and driving a stolen car.
Legal arguments dragged on for another six months: What evidence was admissible and what was not? And on December 30, 1977, Bundy escaped again, using a hacksaw blade to cut through an imperfectly welded steel plate above the light fixture in his cell. He made his way to Chicago, then south to Florida; there, near the Florida State University in Tallahassee, he took a room. A few days later, a man broke into a nearby sorority house and attacked four young women with a club, knocking them unconscious; one was strangled with her pantyhose and raped; another died on her way to the hospital. One of the strangled girl’s nipples had been almost 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 still alive.
Bundy would later confess that he had again been watching girls undress outside the sorority house when he was overwhelmed by the impulse to break in and commit rape.
Three weeks later, on February 6, 1978, Bundy—who was calling himself Chris Hagen—stole a white Dodge van and left Tallahassee; he rented a room at the Holiday Inn, using a stolen credit card. The following day, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach walked out of her classroom in Lake City, Florida, and vanished. Bundy returned to Tallahassee to take a date out for an expensive meal—paid for with a stolen credit card—then absconded via the fire escape, owing large arrears of rent. At 4 a.m. on February 15, a police patrolman noticed an orange Volkswagen driving suspiciously slowly, and radioed for a check on its number; it proved to be stolen from Tallahassee. After a struggle and a chase, during which he tried to kill the policeman, Bundy was captured yet again. When the police learned his real name, and that he had just left a town in which five young women had been attacked, they suddenly understood the importance of their capture.
Bundy seemed glad to be in custody, and began to unburden himself. He explained that “his problem” had begun when he had seen a girl on a bicycle in Seattle, and “had to have her.” He had followed her, but she escaped. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “I feel like a vampire.”
On April 7, a party of searchers along the Suwanee River found the body of Kimberly Leach in an abandoned hut; she had been strangled and sexually violated. Three weeks later, surrounded by hefty guards, Bundy allowed impressions of his teeth to be taken, for comparison with the marks on the buttocks of the dead student, Lisa Levy.
Bundy’s lawyers persuaded him to enter into plea bargaining: in exchange for a guarantee of life imprisonment—rather than a death sentence—he would confess to the murders of Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, and Kimberley Leach. But Bundy changed his mind at the last moment and decided to sack his lawyers.
His trial began on June 25, 1979, and the evidence against him was damning: a witness who had seen him leaving the sorority house after the attacks; a pantyhose mask found in the room of Cheryl Thomas, which resembled the one found in Bundy’s car; but above all, the fact that Bundy’s teeth matched the marks on Lisa Levy’s buttocks. The highly compromising taped interview with the Pensacola police was judged inadmissible in court because his lawyer had not been present.
Bundy again dismissed his defense and took it over himself; the general impression was that he was trying to be too clever. The jury took only six hours to find him guilty on all counts. Judge Ed Cowan pronounced sentence of death by electrocution, but evidently felt some sympathy for the good-looking young defendant. “It’s a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. . . . But you went the wrong way, partner. Take care of yourself . . .”
Bundy was taken to Raiford Prison in Florida, where he was placed on Death Row. On July 2, 1986, when he was due to die a few hours before serial killer Gerald Stano, both were granted a stay of execution.
But at 7 a.m. on January 4, 1989, Bundy was finally led into the execution chamber at Starke State Prison, Florida; behind Plexiglas, an invited audience of forty-eight people sat waiting. As two wardens 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 on to his head with screws and his face covered with a black hood. At 7:07 a.m. 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 slammed 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.
The Bundy case illustrates the immense problems faced by investigators of serial murders before the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program made it all simpler by computerizing crimes and suspects. When Meg Anders telephoned the police after the double murder near Lake Sammamish, Bundy’s name had already been suggested by three people. But he was only one of 3,500 suspects.
Later Bundy was added to the list of 100 “best suspects” that investigators constructed on grounds of age, occupation, and past record. Two hundred thousand items were fed into computers, including the names of 41,000 Volkswagen owners, 5,000 men with records of mental illness, every student who had taken classes with the dead girls, and all transfers from other colleges that they had attended. All this was programmed into thirty-seven categories, each using a different criterion to isolate the suspect. Asked to name anyone who came up on any three of these lists, the computer produced 16,000 names. When the number was raised to four, it was reduced to 600. Only when it was raised to 25 was it reduced to 10 suspects, with Bundy seventh on the list. The police were still investigating number six when Bundy was detained in Salt Lake City with burgling tools in his car. Only after that did Bundy become suspect number one. And by that time, he had already committed a minimum of seventeen murders.
Detective Robert Keppel, who worked on the case, is certain that Bundy would have been revealed as suspect number one even if he had not been arrested.
The Bundy case is doubly baffling because he seems to contradict the basic assertions of every major criminologist of the past century. Bundy is not an obvious born criminal, with degenerate physical characteristics, as Cesare Lombroso suggested in Criminal Man (1876); there is (as far as is known) no history of insanity in his family; he was not a social derelict or a failure. In her book The Stranger Beside Me, his friend Ann Rule describes him as “a man of unusual accomplishment.” How could the subtlest “psychological profiling” target such a man as a serial killer?
The answer to the riddle emerged fairly late in the day, four years after Bundy had been sentenced to death. Before his conviction, Bundy had indicated his willingness to cooperate on a book about himself, and two journalists, Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, went to interview him in prison. They discovered that Bundy had no wish to discuss guilt, except to deny it, and he actively discouraged them from investigating the case against him. He wanted them to produce a gossipy book focusing squarely on himself, like bestselling biographies of celebrities such as Frank Sinatra. Michaud and Aynesworth would have been happy to write a book demonstrating his innocence, but as they looked into the case, they found it impossible to accept this; instead, they concluded that he had killed at least twenty-one women.
When they began to probe, Bundy hedged, lied, claimed faulty memory, and resorted to endless self-justification: “Intellectually,” say Michaud and Aynesworth, “Ted seemed profoundly disassociative, a compartmentalizer, and thus a superb rationalizer.”
Emotionally, he struck them as a severe case of arrested development: “He might as well have been a twelve-year-old, and a precocious and bratty one at that. So extreme was his childishness that his pleas of innocence were of a character very similar to that of the little boy who’ll deny wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This gave Michaud the ingenious idea of suggesting that Bundy should “speculate on the nature of a person capable of doing what Ted had been accused (and convicted) of doing.” Bundy embraced this idea with enthusiasm, and talked for hours into a tape recorder. Soon Michaud became aware that there were, in effect, two “Teds”—the analytical human being, and an entity inside him that Michaud came to call the “hunchback,” the Mr. Hyde alter ego.
After generalizing for some time about violence in modern society, the disintegration of the home, and so on, Bundy got down to specifics, and began to discuss his own development.
He had been an illegitimate child, born to a respectable young woman in Philadelphia. She moved to Seattle to escape the stigma, and married a cook in the Veterans Administration Hospital. Ted was an oversensitive and self-conscious child who had all the usual daydreams of fame and wealth. And at an early stage he became a thief and something of a habitual liar—as many imaginative children do. But he seems to have been deeply upset by the discovery of his illegitimacy.
Bundy was not, in fact, a brilliant student. Although he struck his fellow students as witty and cultivated, his grades were usually Bs. In his late teens he became heavily infatuated with a fellow student, “Stephanie Brooks,” as Ann Rule calls her in The Stranger Beside Me, who was beautiful, sophisticated, and came from a wealthy family. She responded and the couple became engaged. To impress her he enrolled at Stanford University to study Chinese; but he felt lonely away from home, and his grades were poor. “I found myself thinking about standards of success that I just didn’t seem to be living up to.”
“Stephanie” wearied of his immaturity and threw him over—the severest blow so far. He became intensely moody. “Dogged by feelings of worthlessness and failure,” he took a job as a busboy in a hotel dining room. And at this point began the drift that eventually turned him into a serial killer. He became friendly with a drug addict. One night, they entered a cliffside house that had been partly destroyed by a landslide, and stole whatever they could find. “It was really thrilling,” he remembered.
He was soon shoplifting and stealing “for thrills,” once walking openly into someone’s greenhouse, taking an eight-foot tree in a pot, and putting it in his car with the top sticking out of the sunroof. He also became the official driver for Art Fletcher, a black councilman who was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Washington State. He enjoyed the sense of being a “somebody” and mixing with interesting people. But Fletcher lost the election and Bundy took a job as a salesman in a department store. He met Meg Anders in a college beer joint, and they became lovers—she had a gentle, easy-going nature, which brought out Bundy’s protective side. But his kleptomania shocked her.
In fact, the criminal side—the “hunchback”—was now developing fast. He acquired a taste for violent pornography—then (in the 1960s) easy to buy. And one fateful day, walking round the university district, he saw a young woman undressing in a lighted room. This was the turning point in his life. He began to devote hours to walking around, hoping to spy on more young women undressing. He was back at the university, studying psychology, but his night prowling prevented him from making full use of his undoubted intellectual capacities. He obtained his degree in due course and tried to find a law school that would take him. He failed all the aptitude tests and was repeatedly turned down. A year later, he was finally accepted at the University of Utah College of Law—he worked for the crime commission for a month, as an assistant, and for the Office of Justice Planning. His self-confidence increased by leaps and bounds. When he flew to San Francisco to see “Stephanie,” the girl who had jilted him, she was deeply impressed, and willing to rekindle their romance. He was still involved with Meg Anders, and entered on this new career as a Don Juan with his usual enthusiasm. He and “Stephanie” spent Christmas together and renewed their engagement. Then he dumped her as she had once dumped him.
By this time, he had committed his first murder. As noted, he had for years been a pornography addict and a Peeping Tom. (“He approached it almost like a project, throwing himself into it, literally, for years.”) Then the “hunchback” started to demand “more active gratification.” He tried disabling women’s cars, but they always had help on hand. He felt the need to indulge in this kind of behavior after drinking had reduced his inhibitions. One evening, he stalked a young woman from a bar, found a heavy piece of wood, and managed to get ahead of her and lie in wait. Before she reached his hiding place, she stopped at her front door, and went inside. But the experience, he said, was like “making a hole in a dam.”
A few evenings later, as a woman was fumbling for her keys at her front door, he struck her on the head with a piece of wood. She collapsed, screaming, and he ran away. He was filled with remorse, and swore he would never do such a thing again. But six months later, he followed a woman home and peeped and masturbated as she undressed.
He began to do this repeatedly. One day, when he knew she had forgotten to lock her door, he sneaked in, entered her bedroom, and jumped on her. She screamed and he ran away. Once again, there was a period of self-disgust and revulsion.
This was in the autumn of 1973. On January 4, 1974, he found a door that admitted him to the basement room of an eighteen-year-old woman. Now, for the first time, he employed the technique he later used repeatedly, attacking her with a crowbar until she was unconscious. He then savagely rammed a bar torn from the bed inside her vagina, causing internal injuries. But he left her alive.
On the morning of February 1, 1974, he found an unlocked front door in a students’ house and went in. He entered a bedroom at random; twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy was asleep in bed. He battered her unconscious, and then carried her out to his car. He drove to Taylor Mountain, twenty miles east of Seattle, removed her pajamas, and raped her. When Bundy was later “speculating” about this crime for Stephen Michaud’s benefit, the interviewer asked: “Was there any conversation?” Bundy replied: “There’d be some. Since this woman in front of him represented not a person, but, again, the image of something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalize her.”
He then bludgeoned Lynda to death; Bundy always insisted that he took no pleasure in violence, but that his chief desire was “possession” of another person. Now the “hunchback” was in full control, and there were five more victims over the next five months. Three of the young women were taken to the same spot on Taylor Mountain and there raped and murdered—Bundy acknowledged that his sexual gratification would sometimes take hours. The four bodies were found together in the following year.
On the day he abducted the two young women from Lake Sammamish, Bundy “speculated” that he had taken the first, Janice Ott, to a nearby house and raped her. He then returned to the lake to abduct Denise Naslund, taking her back to the same house and raping her in view of Janice. He then killed them both, drove their bodies to a remote spot four miles northeast of the park, and dumped them.
By the time he had reached this point in his “confession,” Bundy had no further secrets to reveal; everything was obvious. Rape had become a compulsion that dominated his life. When he moved to Salt Lake City to enter the law school—he was a failure from the beginning as a law student—he must have known that if he began to rape and kill young women there, he would be establishing himself as suspect number one. This made no difference; he had to continue. Even the unsuccessful kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, and the knowledge that someone could now identify him, made no difference to him. He merely switched his activities to Colorado.
Following his arrest, conviction, and escape, he moved to Florida, and the compulsive attacks continued, although by now he must have known that another series of murders in a town to which he had recently moved must reduce his habitual plea of “coincidence” to an absurdity. It seems obvious that by this time he had lost the power of choice. In his last weeks of freedom, Bundy showed all the signs of weariness and self-disgust.
Time finally ran out for Bundy in January 1989. Long before this, he had recognized that his fatal mistake was to decline to enter into plea-bargaining at his trial; the result was a death sentence instead of life imprisonment. In January 1989, his final appeal was turned down and the date of execution fixed. He then made a last-minute attempt to save his life by offering to bargain murder confessions for a reprieve—against the advice of his attorney James Coleman, who warned him that this attempt to “trade over the victims’ bodies” would only create hostility that would mitigate against further stays of execution. That same year, Ressler attempted to arrange an interview with Bundy for his research project—Bundy was articulate and intelligent, and Ressler hoped to add something to what he knew about the motivation of serial killers. His plan did not work out at that time, but two years later he was surprised to receive a letter from Bundy saying that he would like to become a consultant to the BSU. This was fairly obviously a long-shot attempt to delay his execution; if he could become a valuable consultant, his chances of being executed would be correspondingly smaller.
At their meeting, Bundy stuck out his hand even before Ressler extended his (establishing himself as being in charge of the situation) and told Ressler how much he admired his writing. (Ressler had at this time only cowritten one book on sexual homicide.) Bundy said he wondered why Ressler had not come to see him earlier, and Ressler replied he had tried but been unable to because Bundy’s appeals were still pending. Bundy apologized, explaining that he would very much like to talk to someone on his own level of understanding—a clear attempt at manipulation reminiscent of John Gacy.
Bundy agreed to answer questions on a “speculative” basis—as with his earlier interviews with Michaud and Aynesworth—and described how he had abducted Caryn Campbell from a hotel at a ski resort in Colorado in January 1979. But he would not admit that he had actually done this, and “after three or four hours of this sort of dancing around the issues,” said Ressler, “I realized that Bundy would never talk, that he would attempt to con people . . . until executed, and I went home.”
In a final attempt to bargain for his life, Bundy finally went on to confess to eight Washington murders, and then to a dozen others. Detective Bob Keppel, who had led the investigation in Seattle, commented: “The game-playing stuff cost him his life.” Instead of making a full confession, Bundy doled out information bit by bit. “The whole thing was orchestrated,” said Keppel, “We were held hostage for three days.” And finally, when it was clear that there was no chance of further delay, Bundy confessed to the Chi Omega Sorority killings, admitting that he had been peeping through the window at girls undressing until he was carried away by desire and entered the building.
He also mentioned pornography as being one of the factors that led him to murder. Newspaper columnists showed an inclination to doubt this, but Bundy’s earlier confessions to Michaud leave no doubt that he was telling the truth.
Ann Rule’s book on Bundy contains another vital clue to his motivations. She comments that Bundy became violently upset if he telephoned Meg Anders from Salt Lake City—where his legal studies were foundering—and got no reply. “Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected—demanded—that she be totally loyal to him.” This, of course, is the Right Man of A. E. Van Vogt, the man who will never, under any circumstances, admit he is in the wrong, and spends his life building a sand castle of self-esteem based on illusions. Such a man is often constantly unfaithful to his wife, yet demands total fidelity from her.
Clearly, the Right Man syndrome is a form of mild insanity. Yet it is alarmingly common; most of us know a Right Man, and some have the misfortune to have a Right Man for a husband or father.
The syndrome obviously arises from the sheer competitiveness of the world we are born into. Every normal male has an urge to be a “winner,” yet he finds himself surrounded by people who seem better qualified for success. One common response is boasting to those who look as if they can be taken in—particularly women. Another is what the late Stephen Potter called “one-upmanship,” the attempt to make the other person feel inferior by a kind of cheating—for example, by pretending to know far more than you actually know. Another is to bully people over whom one happens to have authority. Many Right Men are so successful in all of these departments that they achieve a remarkably high level of self-esteem on remarkably slender talents. Once achieved, this self-esteem is like an addictive drug and any threat of withdrawal seems terrifying. Hence the violence with which he reacts to anything that challenges it.
It would probably be true to say that all serial killers are Right Men.
