Murder in Lonely Places
In July 1960, I was in Leningrad—formerly Saint Petersburg—at an official reception at the Astoria Hotel, together with Patricia Pitman, my collaborator on An Encyclopedia of Murder. The guests were Russian writers and literary bureaucrats, and at one point I overheard Pat asking a stern-faced lady who spoke excellent English whether there were any important Soviet murder cases we ought to include. The lady snorted contemptuously that such crimes were symptomatic of Western decadence and were virtually unknown under communism.
It was precisely this attitude that would cost dozens of lives in southern Russia in the 1980s, when Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s worst serial killer, was operating.
In the autumn of 1990, a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian police were hunting a serial murderer who had been killing for at least ten years, and who was one of the worst sadists and sexual perverts in human history.
One of the main reasons the police found him so difficult to track down was the Soviet policy of giving little or no publicity to murder. While a wave of serial killings was taking place around Rostov-on-Don, the Soviet press continued to insist that Russia’s crime rate was virtually nil. So Russian women or children who might otherwise have thought twice about accompanying a strange man to some lonely spot had no idea that they might be in danger.
To the police, the Rostov Ripper was known as the lesopolosa killer, or Forest Path Killer, because so many of the victims had been found in woodland. He killed children just as readily as adults, and boys as readily as girls. He preferred to pick up his victims on trains, or in public places such as bus stations, and then take them to some quiet place, where he strangled or stabbed them to death, performed horrific mutilations, and sometimes cooked and ate parts of the body. As far as Major Mikhail Fetisov, the head of the Rostov CID, was concerned, the murders had begun on June 12, 1982, when thirteen-year-old Lyubov Biryuk disappeared on her way home from an errand in the village of Donskoi. Thirteen days later, her body—reduced to little more than a skeleton by the heat—had been found behind some bushes. She had been stabbed twenty-two times, and chips of bone missing from around the sockets suggested that the killer had even stabbed at her eyes. Her state of undress indicated a sex crime. Because Lyubov was the niece of a police lieutenant, the case aroused more attention than it might otherwise have done, and Fetisov investigated it personally. From the fact that the killer had taken such a risk—the main road was a few yards away—Fetisov deduced that he was driven by an overpowering sex urge, while the number of stab wounds indicated a sadist for whom stabbing was a form of sexual penetration.
Thirty-four-year-old Vladimir Pecheritsa, a convicted rapist, was hauled in for questioning—he had been at a nearby venereal clinic on the day of the murder. Russian interrogation techniques, developed by the secret police, were designed to extract a confession in the shortest possible time. But instead of confessing, Pecheritsa went away and hanged himself, the first of five men who would end their lives after becoming suspects.
With Pecheritsa’s death, Fetisov hoped that the case was closed. But before 1982 was over, two adult female bodies—reduced to unidentifiable skeletons—were discovered lying in woodland near Rostov. Both victims had been stabbed repeatedly, and stab marks around the eyes made it clear that these killings were the work of the same person as the others—the Forest Path Killer. Fetisov organized a special squad of ten detectives to hunt the maniac. It would later develop that the Forest Path Killer had killed another four victims that year: Lyuba Volubuyeva, fourteen; Oleg Pozhidayev, nine; Olga Kuprina, sixteen; and Olga Stalmachenok, ten. Many of the murders took place near the town of Shakhty, not far from Rostov. The newly formed “Red Ripper” unit therefore began by dispersing police over a wide area, hoping to come upon the murderer by chance.
During 1983, the Forest Path Killer kept up a steady pace of slaughter: June 18, Laura Sarkisyan, fifteen; August 8, Igor Gudkov, seven; August 8, Irina Dunenkova, thirteen; and December 27, Sergei Markov, fourteen. By the next year, however, the killer seemed to be butchering in a frenzy. On January 9, he killed seventeen-year-old Natalya Shalapinia. On February 22, he killed a forty-four-year-old vagrant named Marta Ryabyenko, in Rostov’s Aviator Park. Ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov was found near Novoshakhtinsk on March 27. In early July, police found evidence of a double murder in woods near Shakhty—a woman whose skull had been smashed in, and a ten-year-old girl who had been beheaded. In late July, another woman’s body as found in woods near Shakhty. On August 3, it was a sixteen-year-old girl named Natalia Golosovskaya, found in Aviator Park; on the 10th, seventeen-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva, in woods near the Rostov beach; on the 12th, a thirteen-year-old boy named Dmitri Illaryonov, who had been castrated; on August 26, an unidentified woman in woods thirty miles east of Rostov; on September 2, eleven-year-old Aleksandr Chepel; on September 7, twenty-five-year-old Irina Luchinskaya, again in Aviator Park. Twelve murders in eight months.
The police had one important clue. Semen found on the clothes of many of the victims revealed that the killer had blood type AB, the rarest blood group. Unfortunately, this seemingly ironclad clue would mislead investigators more disastrously than any other during the long investigation.
On a hot evening at the end of August 1984, Major Alexander Zanasovsky, one of the “murder squad” watching the Rostov bus station, spotted a tall, well-dressed man with a briefcase and thick glasses talking to a teenage girl. When she caught a bus, he then moved on to another. Zanasovsky decided to ask the man to step into the police office on the station. There the gray-haired suspect produced his identification papers, which showed him to be Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo—not a typical Russian name. His credentials seemed to be impeccable: he was graduate of the philological faculty of Rostov’s university, a married man with two children, the head of the supply department of one of the city’s main factories, and—most impressive of all—a member of the Communist Party. Chikatilo explained to Zanasovsky that he lived in Shakhty, and was about to return home. He had once been a teacher, he said, and simply enjoyed talking to kids. His story sounded reasonable enough, and Zanasovsky let him go. The soft-spoken man certainly did not look like a serial killer.
Zanasovsky asked the girl if Chikatilo had tried to persuade her to go with him; she said no, he just asked her about her studies.
But when, two weeks later—on August 13—Zanasovsky again spied Chikatilo approaching two teenaged girls in succession at the bus station, he decided that it might be worth following him. When Chikatilo boarded an airport bus, Zanasovsky was right behind him, together with a plainclothes colleague, and they watched him trying to catch the eye of female passengers. Two stops farther on, Chikatilo got off the bus and boarded another on the other side of the road. Here again he tried to engage female passengers in conversation—not with the irritating manner of a man looking for a pickup, but casually and kindly, as if he simply liked people. When he had no luck, he climbed on another bus. In two and a half hours he switched buses repeatedly, after which he tried to approach girls outside the Central Restaurant, and then sat on a park bench paying particular attention to female passers-by. At three in the morning, he was in the waiting room at the mainline railway station, attempting more pick-ups. Finally, when the station was almost deserted, he succeeded with a teenaged girl in a track suit, who was lying on a bench trying to sleep. She seemed to agree to whatever he was proposing, and he removed his jacket, and placed it over her head as she lay in his lap. Movements under the jacket, and the expression on Chikatilo’s face, revealed that she was performing oral sex on him. After that, at 5 a.m., Chikatilo took the first tram of the day, and got off in the central market. Zanasovsky decided it was time to make an arrest, and placed his hand on the man’s shoulder. Chikatilo recognized him, and his face broke into sweat; but he made no protest when Zanasovsky told him that he would have to accompany him to the nearest police station.
There the contents of the briefcase seemed to justify Zanasovsky’s belief that he had arrested the Forest Path Killer. It contained a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade, a dirty towel, some rope, and a jar of Vaseline.
Chikatilo’s story was that he had missed his bus to Shakhty and was merely killing time. The knife, he said, was to slice sausage and other comestibles. He also agreed to take a blood test.
Zanasovsky was amazed when the test showed Chikatilo to be innocent. His blood group was A, not AB as was the semen found in the bodies. He was held, nevertheless, on an unrelated charge relating to the theft of a roll of linoleum that had vanished when Chikatiko was in charge of supplies to a factory. Three months later, he was released.
The murders near Rostov had stopped, but when a woman’s corpse was found with similar mutilations near Moscow, there was fear that the killer had moved.
In fact, it soon became clear that the killer was still in the Rostov area when, on August 28, 1985, another mutilated corpse was found in the woods near Shakhty—an eighteen-year-old mentally retarded vagrant named Irina Gulyaeva
In retrospect, her death was a turning point in the investigation. In Moscow, the authorities decided that the case must be solved at all costs. The murder team was increased substantially with additional detectives and legal experts. And a new man had to be placed in charge of the new “Killer Department.” He was Inspector Issa Kostoyev, known as one of the best detectives in Russia. It was Kostoyev who finally had the satisfaction of hearing the confession of the Forest Path Killer.
At the start of Kostoyev’s investigation, all was frustration. The murders ceased for almost two years. But between May 1987 and November 1990 the body count rose by at least eighteen. During that time, Fetisov and Buratov used their greatly increased manpower to keep a watch on railway stations, bus stations, and trains. There was evidence that the killer had lured victims off trains at fairly remote stations—for example, two victims had been found in Donleskhoz, in the middle of a forestry commission area. Was there some method of persuading the Forest Path Killer to choose such a station, rather than Rostov or Shakhty? Suppose, for example, they placed uniformed policemen at all the large stations? Would that not encourage the killer to use the smaller ones?
The huge operation required 360 men, mostly placed prominently at large stations. But at three smaller stations—Donleskhoz, Kundryucha, and Lesostep—there would only be a few discreet plainclothes men.
On November 12, 1990, Fetisov reached a new low point in morale. Yet another body—this time of a young woman—had been found near Donleskhoz station, in spite of the plainclothes surveillance. Her name was Svetlana Korostik, twenty-two, and she had been disembowelled; her tongue had also been removed. She had been dead about a week.
But, explained the quite nervous and stammering plainclothesman, they had been taking names of all middle-aged men on the station during that time. They had a pile of forms, which they intended to send to Rostov very soon . . .
When the promised paperwork at last arrived, Fetisov ran his eye over the forms, noting the names. Suddenly, he stopped. He had seen this name before—Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. He turned to Burakov. “Have you ever heard of this man?” Burakov had. He recalled that Fetisov had been on holiday when Chikatilo was arrested in 1984. Now he was able to tell his superior that Chikatilo had been cleared because he was of the wrong blood type. But Fetisov then recalled an interesting piece of information issued to all law enforcement agencies from the Ministry of Health in 1988: police should no longer assume that a sex criminal’s blood type was the same type as his semen. Rare cases had been found of men whose blood and semen types differed. Both Fetisov and Burakov felt that Chikatilo had to be the man they were looking for. The first step was to find his address. It seemed that he no longer lived in Shakhty, but in Novocherkassk, and that he worked in a locomotive repair works in Rostov.
The entire investigation now focused on Chikatilo.
Fetisov learned that his job had once allowed him to travel widely, and that this was the period when victims were found over a wide area. When his job confined him to the Rostov area, the victims were found there. As a schoolteacher, he had been dismissed for child molesting. He had been dismissed from the Communist Party. And while he had been in prison for three months in 1984, the murders had stopped abruptly.
Now that they were almost certain that they had their man, it was tempting to shadow him and try to catch him in the act. But that entailed the obvious risk that he might kill before the tail could stop him. It would be safer to place him under arrest. Kostoyev, told of this development, agreed. He also agreed to allow Fetisov to conduct the preliminary interview.
At 3:40 on the afternoon of November 20, 1990, three plainclothesmen in an unmarked car drove to Novocherkassk, and waited at a point where—they knew from the surveillance team—Chikatilo would soon be passing. In fact, Chikatilo halted outside a café. The policemen approached him, and one asked his name. “Andrei Chikatilo,” he replied.
Without speaking, Chikatilo held out his wrists for the handcuffs.
The man who was brought into Mikhail Fetisov’s office did not look like a mass murderer. He was tall—about six feet—and thin, although obviously muscular, and his face had a worn and exhausted look. He wore glasses and certainly looked “respectable.” His shoulders were stooped, and he walked with a shuffle, like an old man. The only sign of degeneracy was the mouth, with its loose, sagging corners, suggesting a weak character.
Chikatilo was subdued and politely uncooperative. He never looked Kostoyev in the eye. At first all he would say was that he had been arrested for the same crimes before, and had been released as innocent.
But Kostoyev had received a piece of information that left him in no doubt that Chikatilo was the Forest Path Killer. Comparison of his blood type and his semen—he had been masturbating behind a newspaper in his cell and left traces on his underpants—revealed that he was indeed one of those rare males whose blood type differs from his semen. His blood type was A, his semen AB—as was the killer’s.
At the third interrogation, Kostoyev spoke to him kindly, and asked about childhood problems. Suddenly, Chikatilo asked if he could write a statement. In this, he spoke of having deranged sexual feelings, and “committing certain acts.” The remainder consisted of self-pitying complaints about how he had felt degraded since schooldays, how everyone jeered at him, and how later employers had treated him with contempt. His “perverted sex acts,” he said, were an expression of his fury at all this mistreatment. “I could not control my actions.”
The next day, all the ground seemed to be lost as Chikatilo went back to fencing and evasions.
Time was running out. They had ten days to question a suspect before charging him, and this allotment was nearly up. Chikatilo did not take well to Kostoyev’s approach—the approach of a top Soviet official who is accustomed to authority. And as it became clear that the ten days would not bring the confession they expected, Buratov made a suggestion—that Kostoyev should give way to someone with a “softer” approach. A local psychiatrist, Alexander Bukhanovsky, had already written his own detailed psychological portrait of the Forest Path Killer. He was now called in, and his more sympathetic approach soon produced results. As Bukhanovsky read his own words aloud, Chikatilo listened with a silence that had ceased to be hostile or noncommittal, and was obviously moved by the psychiatrist’s insights into the lifetime of humiliation and disaster that had turned him into a killer. Soon he was holding back tears. Next he was telling the story of his life as if he was lying on a couch. Towards evening, he suddenly confessed to his first murder.
It was not, as Bukhanovsky had expected, that of Lyuba Biryuk in 1982, but of a nine-year-old child named Lena Zakhotnova, and it had taken place four years earlier, in 1978. In that year, Chikatilo explained, he had bought a dacha—hardly more than a wooden hut—at the far end of Shakhty.
Three days before Christmas 1978, when night had already fallen, he saw a pretty little girl dressed in a red coat with a furry collar and a rabbit-fur hat standing at a tram stop. He asked her where she had been until such a late hour, and she explained that she had gone to see a friend after school. As they talked, she found his friendly manner irresistible, and was soon admitting that she badly needed to find a toilet. Chikatilo told her that he lived just around the corner, and invited her to use his.
Inside the hut, he hurled her onto the floor, and with his hand over her mouth, tore at her clothes. His intention was rape, but he was unable to summon an erection. He ruptured her hymen with his finger—and immediately achieved a violent orgasm at the sight of the blood.
It was, he admitted to Bukhanovsky, a revelation. Now he suddenly understood: he needed to see blood to achieve maximum excitement. Still gripped by sexual fever, he took out a folding knife, and began to stab the screaming child in the stomach. It was then that he discovered something else about himself—that stabbing with a knife brought an even greater delight than normal sexual penetration.
He carried the girl’s body and her clothes to the river, and hurled them in. They drifted under a bridge and were not found for two days.
Chikatilo was an immediate suspect. He was taken in for questioning nine times. Then he had an incredible piece of luck. Not far from his shack lived twenty-five-year-old Alexander Kravchenko, who had served six years in prison for a rape-murder in the Crimea. The police transferred their attention to Kravchenko, “interrogated” him, and soon obtained a “confession.” Kravchenko was executed—by a pistol shot in the back of the head—in 1984.
From then on, Chikatilo admitted, he knew that his deepest sexual satisfaction could only come from stabbing and the sight of blood. But the unpleasant memories of the police interrogations made him cautious, and for almost three years he kept out of trouble. Meanwhile, he had been made redundant as a schoolteacher, and begun working as a supply clerk in Shakhty. This involved traveling all over the country, and offered him new opportunities. On September 3, 1981, he fell into conversation with a seventeen-year-old girl, Larisa Tkachenko, at a bus stop in Rostov. She was his favorite kind of pickup—a rebellious school dropout with a taste for vodka, who would offer sex in exchange for a meal. She agreed to accompany him to a local recreation area. There his control snapped. He hurled her to the ground, bludgeoned her with his fists, rammed earth into her mouth to stop her screams, and then strangled her. After that, he bit off her nipples and ejaculated on the naked body. Then he ran around the corpse, howling with joy, and waving her clothes. It was half an hour before he hid the body under branches.
And now he had crossed a kind of mental Rubicon.
He knew he was destined to kill for sexual enjoyment. Before he had finished, Chikatilo had confessed to fifty-three murders—a dozen more than anyone had suspected. He never admitted to cannibalism, although the fact that he took cooking equipment with him on his “hunting expeditions” leaves little doubt of it.
In mid-December 1990, the Russian public finally learned that the Forest Path Killer had been caught when Kostoyev called a press conference. Before the coming of Gorbachev and glasnost, the news would have been kept secret. Now this horrific story of a Russian Jack the Ripper quickly made headlines all around the world. This was the world’s first intimation that the Soviet Union was not as crime-free as communist propaganda had insisted.
The trial of Andrei Chikatilo began in the Rostov courthouse on April 14, 1992. In any other country but Russia, it would have been regarded as a circus rather than an administration of justice. In any Western country, its conduct would certainly have formed grounds for an appeal that would have led to a second trial, and even possibly overturned the verdict.
Chikatilo, his head shaved and wearing a 1982 Olympics shirt, was placed in a large cage, to protect him from attacks by the public. This was a real possibility, since the court was packed with angry relatives, who frequently interrupted the proceedings with screams of “Bastard!” “Murderer!” “Sadist!”
Chikatilo confessed to all the crimes except the very first, that of the murder of Lena Zakhotnova. Kostoyev had no doubt that this was because pressure had been brought to bear; he had actually succeeded in obtaining a posthumous pardon for the executed murderer, Kravchenko, but the legal authorities obviously felt that it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie.
On October 14, 1982, as Chikatilo received individual sentences for fifty-two murders, the court was filled with shrieks that often drowned out the judge’s voice.
Sixteen months later, on February 14, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was executed by a single shot in the back of the neck, fired from a small-caliber Makarov pistol.
Within two years of the execution of Andrei Chikatilo, a killer who seemed even more violent and ruthless than the Forest Path Killer threw the Ukraine into a panic. Chikatilo killed individuals; the murderer who was labeled “the Terminator” (after the Arnold Schwarzenegger film) killed whole families, including children. By the time of his arrest in April 1996, the Terminator had killed forty victims. Later, he would confess to another dozen murders in an earlier orgy of killing that started in 1989.
On the morning of Sunday April 7, 1996, police investigator Igor Khuney, in the Ukrainian town of Yavoriv, received a phone call from a man called Pyotr Onoprienko, complaining about his cousin Anatoly, who had until recently lived in his home. Pyotr had evicted him after finding a stock of firearms in his room, and Anatoly had threatened to “take care” of Pyotr’s family at Easter—which happened to be that day. Would the police go and see Anatoly? He was, said Pyotr, living with a woman in nearby Zhitomirskaya.
This caught Khuney’s attention, for he had recently been informed of the theft of a twelve-gauge, Russian-made Tos-34 shotgun in that area. And in recent months there had been an outbreak of appalling murders of entire families, most of them involving a rifle or shotgun. On intuition, Khuney’s superior Sergei Kryukov decided to interview Onoprienko. He took twenty policemen with him in squad cars.
They were taking no chances. When a small, balding man with piercing blue eyes opened the door, he was swiftly overpowered. Asked for identification, he led them to a closet. As a policeman opened the door, the man dived for a pistol, but failed to reach it.
When Onoprienko’s woman friend returned home from church with her two small children, Kryukov told her that they thought her lover might be the suspected mass murderer. She broke down and wept.
In the apartment, police located 122 items that belonged to numerous unsolved murder victims, but the police still need a confession from their suspect. In police custody, Onoprienko refused to speak until he was questioned by a general. But when one was brought in—General Romanuk—Onoprienko confessed that he had used the stolen shotgun in a recent murder. Admissions to more than fifty murders then came pouring out.
The recent murders began on Christmas Eve 1995, in Garmarnia, a small village in central Ukraine, near the Polish border. A man entered the home of a forester, and killed him, his wife, and his two sons with a sawn-off double-barreled hunting rifle. He stole a few items of jewelry and a bundle of clothes before setting the house on fire. Five nights later he slaughtered another family of four—a young man, his wife, and her twin sisters. It was in Bratkovychi, another remote village near the Polish border. Again the killer stole items of 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; twenty-eight people died, and one woman was raped. In Enerhodar, seven were killed. He 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.
There was panic, and an army division was called in to patrol the villages. An intensive manhunt was mounted—even greater than for Chikatilo. Finally, in April 1996, police arrested Onoprienko near Lvov. The thirty-six-year-old ex–mental patient was soon confessing to a total of fifty-two murders.
Born in 1959, Onoprienko began his career as a forestry student. He would confess: “The first time I killed I shot down a deer in the woods. I was in my early twenties, and I recall feeling very upset when I saw it dead. I couldn’t explain why I had done it, and I felt sorry about it. I never had that feeling again.”
Later he became a sailor on cruise liners. After giving up this well-paid job, he became a fireman. In 1989, he and an accomplice named Sergei Rogozin decided to commit a burglary, but were surprised by the householder, whom they then killed. Rogozin was his accomplice in eight additional murders motivated by theft.
It was during his later killing spree of 1995, he confessed, after a period in a mental hospital in Kiev when he was diagnosed schizophrenic, that he had raped a woman after shooting her in the face. During another spree, he had approached a young girl who had fallen on her knees to pray after seeing him kill her parents. He asked her to tell him where they kept the money, and she stared in his eyes and defiantly said: “No, I won’t.” Onoprienko killed her by smashing her skull; but he admitted later that although he was impressed by her courage he nonetheless still felt nothing during the murders. “To me, killing people is like ripping up a duvet,” he told journalist Mark Franchetti, in his tiny prison cell in Zhitomir, Ukraine, where his trial had been held.
In 1989, “driven by a rage at God and Satan,” he had killed a couple standing by their Lada on a motorway. He also killed five people in a car, and then sat in the car for two hours, wondering what to do with the corpses, which quickly began to smell.
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 confession videotaped in 1997. “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.
Onoprienko claimed that he was driven by some unknown force, and that voices ordered him to kill. “I’m not a maniac,” he insisted to Franchetti, “I have been taken over by a higher force, something telepathic or cosmic, which drove me.” 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 Zhitomir in late November 1998. The delay was due to a lack of funds. The authorities could not afford to try him because his crimes had covered such a wide area. Eventually, after two years, his judges appeared on television to appeal for money, and the Ukrainian government contributed the $56,000 for the trial.
As had Chikatilo, Onoprienko was confined in a metal cage in the courtroom. Sergei Rogozin, the accused accomplice in nine of the killings, stood trial with him. The trial ended four months later, on March 31, 1999, when Onoprienko was found guilty and sentenced to death. Rogozin received thirteen years. Because there is a moratorium on capital punishment in Russia, Onoprienko is still alive and may never be executed. Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, however, spoke of temporarily lifting the moratorium in order to execute him.
For his part, Onoprienko declared that he wished to die. “If I am not executed, I will escape and start killing again. I am being groomed to serve Satan.” He believed that he was destined to kill a large number of people, perhaps 350, and that if his sentence is commuted to life—which in Russia means at most twenty years—he would go on to fulfill his destiny after his release (by which time he would be sixty).
The judge who sentenced him, Dmitri Lipski, said: “He is driven by extreme cruelty. He doesn’t care about anything—only about himself. He is egocentric, and has a very high opinion of himself.”
What motivated all of these murders?
Psychiatrists who examined Onoprienko stated that he was not insane. He was brought up without parents, and his elder brother allowed him to be taken into an orphanage. This, psychiatrists suggested, may be why he has chosen to kill whole families. His worst killing spree occurred at the time he moved in with his girlfriend and her children and it seems possible that this sight of a happy family triggered the resentment that is the key to virtually all serial killers.
Although he proposed to his girlfriend by offering her a ring he had just cut off the finger of a corpse, she insists that he was very tender and loving with the children. Here again we encounter the split personality that seems so typical of a certain type of serial killer.
I have left one of the most interesting profilers of the Behavioral Science Unit to the end. This is partly because Gregg McCrary was relatively a latecomer to the BSU, joining in 1990, but also because two of his three best-known cases—the Toronto Rapist and the poet-killer Jack Unterweger—occurred outside the United States, and are thus appropriate for this final chapter.
A high school teacher and wrestling coach who joined the FBI in 1969—when he was twenty-four—Gregg McCrary spent years working in Michigan, the Midwest, New York, and Buffalo before John Douglas recruited him for the NCAVC. But he proved to be oddly suited to the BSU because he had studied the Japanese martial art of Shorinji Kempo, which emphasizes thinking past the present situation to future strategy—excellent training for out-thinking the criminal mind. He liked what he had seen and heard of the Behavioral Science Unit, and two years before John Douglas became chief in 1990, he applied to join—one of thirty or so who were after the same job. McCrary landed it.
I became acquainted with Gregg in 1989, when a London publisher asked me to write a book about serial killers. I asked a friend who lived nearby, Donald Seaman, if he would like to collaborate with me. As an ex-reporter, the first thing he wanted to do was visit the FBI Academy at Quantico for himself. I rang there, explained I was writing a book about serial murder, and asked if I could speak to someone in the Behavioral Science Unit. A few minutes later, Agent Gregg McCrary was on the line, and when I explained what I wanted, he said that he would see what he could do to arrange it. His intervention was so effective that a few weeks later Don was in Virginia, being guided around the Academy by Gregg—to whom, in due course, we dedicated The Serial Killers. This is how Don describes Gregg in the book:
He stands some six feet in height, a spare, upright figure with a pale face, a carefully trimmed moustache, and brown hair flecked with grey. As with all personnel in the NCAVC he is smartly dressed, reflecting the evident high morale. Equally, this is the FBI at work; McCrary’s dark blue blazer reveals no sign of the Smith & Wesson 9mm semi-automatic below, fully loaded with twelve rounds in the magazine, plus one (for emergency) already in the chamber.
Gregg was kind enough to send me a copy of the useful FBI handbook Criminal Investigative Analysis (1989) by Ressler, Douglas, Anne Burgess, and others. And Don passed on to me a letter from Gregg, in which he discusses my comment that there is a basic suicidal impulse in serial killers, which explains why so many of them make absurd mistakes that land them in the gas chamber. (I had pointed out that one-third of all murderers commit suicide.)
In the letter, dated October 1989, Gregg commented that, being egocentric psychopaths, most serial killers are unfortunately not the suicidal type. “They don’t want to deprive the rest of us of the value of their company.” He goes on:
The exception is the sexually sadistic serial killer. His crimes involve the infliction of physical and psychological terror on his victims. He may use weapons or instruments to torture the victims before death and be involved in experimental sexual activity. He abducts his victims and keeps them for hours, days, months, etc.
While they represent a minority of serial killers, they are the most horrific due to the ante-mortem activity. Examples would be Christopher Wilder, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, etc.
Most serial killers (Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, etc.) kill their victims quickly in a brutal blitz style of attack. Sexual assaults and dismemberment are post-mortem. These types of killers who do not inflict torture prior to death are far less inclined to be suicidal than are the sub group of sexually sadistic serial killers.
This is a point worth underlining. Killers such as Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy are not remotely suicidal because they are so self-absorbed. They remain lifelong adolescents. On the other hand, Henry Lee Lucas confessed because he was overtaken by a kind of religious conversion, and the Boston Strangler because he somehow “outgrew” murder.
On the other hand, I am inclined to wonder if there is such a clear distinction between sadists and non-sadists. Lake committed suicide because he was trapped and faced life in jail. Chris Wilder, a spree killer who murdered and raped half a dozen women on a cross-country rampage in the spring of 1984, turned his gun on himself when cornered. But at least one thing is clear: sex murder is addictive, which is why most sex murderers carry on until they are caught, even if, like Rolling and Onoprienko, they come to feel that they are serving some evil force.
One of McCrary’s first major cases at Quantico is a good example of obsessive addiction—in this case to a kind of necrophilia. The man who became known as the “Genesee River Killer” murdered eleven women in the Rochester area of New York in the late 1980s. In trying to profile the man responsible, McCrary was struck by the evidence of one prostitute who recognized his picture as a client who had wanted her to “play dead.” Like Christie, this man had problems raising an erection with a conscious woman.
Noting that the murders continued even though there was panic in the red-light district, McCrary deduced that the killer seemed so ordinary and nonthreatening that prostitutes saw him as harmless. He probably drove a nondescript car. From behavioral evidence he was probably in his late twenties, or perhaps early thirties. He would work at some menial job, and might well be a fisherman, since so many victims had been found in the Genesee River Gorge, known for its good fishing.
In many of the eleven murders, there were signs that the killer had returned, probably to have sex with the body. But in the case of the last but one, he had also disemboweled his victim. It was this victim, June Stott, who proved to be the turning point in the case, because this lead the local authorities to call in the FBI—and Agent McCrary. For McCrary, the Stott murder showed that the killer was “growing into this. . . . Killing wasn’t enough. He had to come back and cut her open.”
The police decided to make use of helicopters, since the gorge has so many twists and turns where a body might be dumped (it is sometimes called the Grand Canyon of the East). After much frustrating searching, a pilot spotted the body of a woman, clad only in a white shirt, half-concealed by a bridge, and above it, a man who was either urinating or masturbating. The helicopter followed the man and he drove away to the town of Spencerport, where he parked close to a nursing home. The airborne observers watched the heavily built, middle-aged man go inside. After alerting troopers on the ground, the helicopter flew off to protect the crime scene, while the troopers confronted the driver. Lacking I.D, he nonetheless admitted that he was Arthur Shawcross, forty-four, who had once served fifteen years for murdering two children.
When arrested, Shawcross at first denied his guilt. But when asked whether his mistress—who worked in the nursing home—was involved in the murders, he hung his head, and said: “No, I was the only one involved.”
McCrary’s profile proved remarkably accurate—the killer’s appearance, the kind of car he drove, the love of fishing in the gorge, the fact that Shawcross returned to the scenes of his crimes to masturbate. It was not murder that he found most satisfactory; that was merely a means of rendering his victims passive. Like Christie, Shawcross needed an unconscious woman.
The only inaccuracy was the killer’s age—he was forty-four, not twenty-nine or thirty. Then it struck McCrary that Shawcross had been in jail for fifteen years, and that in a sense his development had been on hold during that time. Forty-four was therefore not a bad estimate after all.
Arthur Shawcross, who earlier in life had suffered a number of severe head injuries, one involving a blow from a sledgehammer, was sentenced to a total of 250 years in prison.
This notion of murder as an addictive drug also seems to apply to another case that McCrary profiled, the “Scarborough Rapist,” Paul Bernardo, whose case would have fit perfectly into the chapter on sex slaves except that Bernardo’s three murders do not qualify him as a serial killer.
The rapes began in May 1987. The perpetrator, who was described as young and white, would follow women who alighted from buses in the Scarborough area of east Toronto, attack them from behind, and make sure that they did not see his face. Scarborough is a middle-class area, and he sometimes dragged them behind bushes on the edge of lawns, or between the houses. He called them foul names, and used more violence than was necessary—in one case he broke the victim’s shoulder bone, and smeared her hair with dirt. He raped and sodomized them, and then force them to give him oral sex.
McCrary profiled him as a young man who lived in the area—hence his care in making sure that his victims did not see his face. He felt hatred and resentment towards women. He was probably incapable of sex unless he was inspiring fear, and he was most likely unmarried and lived at home, since as a young man he would be unable to afford his own house in Scarborough.
The rapes had reached a total of fifteen when, in June 1991, fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy disappeared. Two weeks later, parts of her body, encased in concrete, were found on the edge of Lake Gibson, Saint Catherine’s. Then, in April of the following year, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Kristen French, vanished on her way home from school. A witness who had seen a cream-colored car speeding away left the police in no doubt that she had been abducted, almost certainly by two people. Two weeks later her body was found dumped down a side road. She had been beaten and strangled.
The killer was arrested in late January 1993. It happened after DNA profiling had finally identified the Scarborough Rapist. There had been 224 suspects, among these Paul Bernardo, who resembled an identikit drawing of the rapist. Bernardo had given blood, hair, and saliva samples to be compared with the rapist, but had heard nothing further in two years, and assumed he was in the clear. In fact, the DNA testing had proceeded slowly, and Bernardo was among the last five suspects whose body samples were tested. It was only then that the police knew that Paul Bernardo was the Scarborough Rapist they had been seeking for more than five years. The person who revealed him as the killer of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French was his wife—and accomplice in the murders—Karla.
Once again, Gregg McCrary’s profile of the rapist proved remarkably accurate. Bernardo lived in the Scarborough area, was then twenty-three, and was living at home with his parents.
The story, as it then emerged, began when Paul Bernardo, a handsome young businessman of twenty-three met the seventeen-year-old blonde Karla Homolka in a Howard Johnson’s in 1987, and the two lost no time in climbing into bed. Later, it became clear that their affinity was based upon the fact that his sexual tastes veered towards sadism, and hers towards masochism. At sixteen, Karla had allowed a boyfriend to tie her up with his belt and slap her during sex, and discovered that she enjoyed it. The first time she and Paul were alone in her bedroom, he found handcuffs in her pocket, and asked: “Are these for me?” He then handcuffed her to the bed and pretended that he was raping her. As their relationship progressed, she had to dress up as a schoolgirl—with her hair in pigtails tied with ribbons—and he also liked her to wear a dog collar round her neck when they had sex. If she failed to comply with his demands, he beat her. She soon became expert at explaining away her bruises to friends.
When she met Bernardo, Karla was unaware that he was the Scarborough Rapist, whose attacks continued for years after they had met and become engaged.
Sometime before Christmas 1990, Karla had asked Bernardo—by now her fiancé, and living in her home—what he wanted for Christmas, and he had replied: “Your sister, Tammy.” Tammy was fifteen, and still at school. Desperate to please Bernardo, Karla obtained sedatives from the animal clinic where she worked, and on the evening of December 23, 1990, invited Tammy to join them in watching a film after midnight in the basement “den.” They plied the unsuspecting girl with drugged drinks and, when she fell unconscious, Bernardo undressed her and raped her on the floor.
Although she presents an image of blonde sweetness, driven by a desire to present her fiancé with a “surrogate virgin,” Canada’s most notorious female criminal, Karla Homolka, presented her husband, Paul Bernardo, with schoolgirls to rape—and then kill. (Associated Press/Frank Gunn)
It was while Bernardo was raping Tammy—filmed by Karla—that he noticed that she had stopped breathing, and her face had turned blue. The couple’s attempts to revive her failed so they re-dressed her and called an ambulance. No suspicion fell on Karla or Bernardo; the inquest ruled the death accidental. It was assumed that she drank too much and choked on her own vomit.
In June 1991, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl named Leslie Mahaffy arrived at her home at 2 a.m. to find herself locked out. Bernardo came across her sitting disconsolately on a bench in her backyard, and offered her a cigarette. Then he held a knife to her throat, and took her back to the house that he and Karla shared—they were due to get married in two weeks. There he raped her and videotaped her urinating.
The next day Karla had to join in, having lesbian sex with the schoolgirl while Bernardo videotaped them. Leslie was raped repeatedly. When left alone with Karla, Leslie begged her to let her go; Karla replied that if she did, she would be beaten. She gave Leslie two sleeping tablets to “make her feel better,” and while Leslie was asleep, Bernardo looped electrical cord around her throat and strangled her.
Two days later, he dismembered the body with an electric saw, encased the pieces in quick-drying cement, and then dropped them off a bridge into Lake Gibson, with Karla acting as lookout.
Bernardo now decided to seduce a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Jane, who had been a friend of Tammy’s, and who bore a remarkable resemblance to the dead girl. As a “wedding present” for her husband, Karla invited Jane to their house. Jane was flattered by the attention of two adults, and developed a schoolgirl crush on Karla. Once there, the newlyweds served her drugged liquor, and after she fell asleep Karla anaesthetized her with halothane, again obtained from the animal clinic. Bernardo then raped and sodomized her while Karla videoed the acts; Bernardo was particularly delighted to find that Jane had been a virgin. Fortunately for her, she remained unconscious during the rape.
On April 6, 1992, ten months after the murder of Leslie Mahaffy, Karla accompanied Bernardo as they drove in search of another victim. They passed fifteen-year-old Kristen French, walking alone on her way home from school, and Karla called out to ask her directions. The girl came over to their car as Karla produced a map. Bernardo then moved behind her and forced her into the car at knifepoint. After three days of being repeatedly raped and forced to take part in videotapes in which she had to address Bernardo as “master,” Kristen, like Leslie Mahaffy, was murdered. Her naked body was thrown on a dumpsite full of old washing machines.
During the New Year 1993, Bernardo beat Karla more violently than usual, clubbing her with a rubber flashlight and blacking both her eyes. Finally, her mother and sister called when Bernardo was out, and insisted on taking her to hospital. After that she agreed to go home with them. To prevent Bernardo from discovering her whereabouts, she moved in with an aunt and uncle.
Instead of arresting him immediately, the police went to interview Karla. She refused to admit that she knew her husband was the rapist, but when they had gone, blurted out to her uncle and aunt: “Christ, they know everything.” Pressed by her aunt, Karla finally told her about the murder of the two schoolgirls.
Bernardo was arrested on February 17, 1993.
When he finally met the killer, McCrary was able to gauge the remarkable accuracy of his profile. Bernardo hated women because he hated his hostile, neurotic mother, who had told him when he was ten that he was a bastard fathered by her lover. His sex life was therefore dominated by a desire to humiliate and punish woman. His preferred method of sex was to beat a woman as he sodomized her.
In due course, Karla turned state’s evidence, in exchange for a promise of a lighter sentence. She was tried first, for manslaughter, and was sentenced to twelve years. She was released from prison in July 2004. On September 1, 1995, Paul Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment, with the proviso that he should serve a minimum of twenty-five years before he could apply for parole.
Perhaps the most fascinating of all the cases that McCrary profiled was that of Jack Unterweger, poet, dramatist, and TV celebrity. He was also Austria’s first serial killer.
In the summer of 1992, McCrary received a phone call from Vienna. A man was about to go on trial for the murders of eleven women. Would he be willing to profile the case? He replied that if they had the right man, a profile would be unnecessary, and that a signature crime analysis would be more to the point. A “signature” means certain typical elements in a criminal’s modus operandi—for example, the way he ties a knot or takes a certain kind of “trophy.”
Two leading investigators on the case, Ernst Geiger, the policeman who had put the suspect behind bars, and Thomas Muller, chief of the Psychiatric Service, agreed to travel to Quantico. McCrary mentioned in advance that he wanted to know nothing whatever about their suspect—just about the crime scenes.
When Geiger and Muller arrived, the three men devoted several days to studying the files. The murders had taken place in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Los Angeles. The women had all been beaten, and then strangled with an item of their underwear, either bras or pantyhose. No semen was found, either in the bodies or on them. The victims were often killed in woodland, near water, and left covered in leaves.
When McCrary had studied the files, and established that the MOs seemed to indicate the same killer, they turned to the man who had been arrested: Jack Unterweger, ex-convict and now one of Austria’s best-known writers.
Born in 1950, the son of a prostitute and, according to rumor, an American GI, Jack had been abandoned by his mother. He was brought up by an alcoholic grandfather, who often brought prostitutes to the small hut where they lived in a single room. In his teens, Jack was in trouble repeatedly for offenses such as burglary and car theft, and became a pimp who was known for beating up his hookers. Then, in 1974, he was arrested for two murders. The first was of eighteen-year-old Margaret Schaefer, who happened to be a friend of a prostitute named Barbara Scholz. As Unterweger and the latter drove past her in the street, Unterweger invited the girl into the car, and then decided on impulse to rob her and her family’s home. After that he took her to the woods, forced her to undress, and demanded oral sex; when she refused, he beat her unconscious with a steel pipe and then strangled her with her bra. Barbara Scholz gave him away, and he was arrested.
The second victim, a prostitute named Marcia Horveth, had been strangled with her stockings and dumped in a lake. Unterweger was not charged with this murder, because he had already confessed to the first and had been sentenced to life. He pleaded guilty, claiming that as he was having sex, he had seen the face of his mother before him. A psychologist had diagnosed him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic tendencies.
When he went to jail for murder, Unterweger had been illiterate. He had already been in prison fifteen times. But condemned to life, he set about learning to read and write. He then edited the prison newspaper, started a literary review, and wrote his autobiography, a book called Purgatory (Fegefeur), in which he professed to be completely rehabilitated, and explained that he had killed the prostitute because he hated his mother.
Purgatory was a literary sensation, and intellectuals began to lobby for his release. He was paroled on May 23, 1990, after sixteen years behind bars. And he quickly became prosperous as his book climbed to the top of the best-seller charts, and then was filmed. He wrote plays, gave readings of his poetry, and appeared as a guest on talk shows. A small, handsome man who wore white suits and drove expensive cars, his face was soon familiar to everyone in Austria.
Then women began to disappear. The first, a shop assistant, Blanka Bockova, was found on the banks of the Vltava River, near Prague, on September 14, 1990. She had been beaten and strangled with a stocking.
On New Year’s Eve 1991, in a forest near Graz, Austria, nearly three hundred miles south of Prague, another woman was found strangled with her pantyhose. She was Heidemarie Hammerer, a prostitute who had vanished from Graz on October 26, 1990. Five days later, the badly decomposed body of a woman was found in a forest north of Graz. She had been stabbed, and probably strangled with her pantyhose. She was identified as Brunhilde Masser, another prostitute. The decomposed body of a prostitute named Elfriende Schrempf was found eight months later, on October 5, in a forest near Graz. When four more prostitutes, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem, and Karin Eroglu disappeared in Vienna during the next month, it looked as if the killer had changed his location.
And at the point, the police were given their vital lead. Ex-policeman August Schenner, retired for five years from the Vienna force, was reminded of the MO of the prostitute-killer Jack Unterweger sixteen years earlier. Police who checked upon his tip were at first skeptical—Unterweger was rich, famous, and had plenty of girlfriends. Would such a man murder prostitutes? Moreover, as a magazine writer, Unterweger had interviewed prostitutes about the killer the press had labeled the “Vienna Courier,” and been critical of their failure to catch him. If they treated him as a suspect, would it not look as if they were pursuing a vendetta?
Yet as they reviewed the evidence, the Vienna police—and especially Detective Ernst Geiger—decided that the case against Unterweger looked highly convincing. A check on his credit card receipts revealed that his travels had invariably taken him to the same areas where the women were killed. He had been on a magazine assignment in Los Angeles, interviewing prostitutes, when three of them were strangled there in a manner that recalled the Vienna murders. He had even persuaded the Los Angeles Police Department to drive him around red-light districts in their patrol cars.
As his investigation continued, Ernst Geiger learned from prostitutes who had been picked up by Unterweger that he liked to handcuff them during sex—which was consistent with some of the marks on the wrists of victims. Police tracked down the BMW that Unterweger had bought on his release from prison, and found in it a dark hair with skin on the root. It was tiny, but using the PCR technique to make multiple copies of DNA, they were able to identify it as belonging to victim Blanka Bockova. When a search of his apartment revealed a red scarf whose fibers matched those found on her body, they decided to arrest their suspect.
They interviewed Unterweger on October 2, 1991. Naturally, he denied everything. Moreover, he renewed criticism of the police for their failure to catch the Vienna Courier. And support for him among Viennese intellectuals and his society friends remained strong. How could they admit that their enthusiasm for his writing had unleashed a killer on Vienna? Was it not more likely, as Unterweger told them, that the authorities were persecuting this ex-criminal who had now become their scourge?
It was time to bring the suspect into custody. In February 1992 a judge signed the warrant. But when the police arrived at his apartment, Unterweger had already left. They learned from his friends that he had gone on holiday with his latest girlfriend, eighteen-year-old Bianca Mrak, whom he had picked up in a restaurant, and with whom he had been living since the previous December.
It seemed they had gone to Switzerland, and then, when friends tipped him off by telephone that there was a warrant out for him, to New York.
Before leaving Europe, Unterweger had telephoned Vienna newspapers to insist that the police were trying to frame him. He also made an offer: if the officer in charge of the case would drop the warrant for his arrest, he would return voluntarily to “clear his name.” He had alibis, he said, for all of the murders—on one occasion he had been giving a reading of his work.
Unterweger and Bianca moved to Miami, Florida, and rented a beach apartment. They were running short of cash, and Bianca took a job as a topless dancer. Her mother kept them supplied with money by telegraph.
When the police learned about this, they called on the mother, and prevailed on her to inform them the next time her daughter made contact. And when Bianca asked her mother to telegraph more cash to the Western Union office in Miami, two agents were waiting for them. The alert Unterweger spotted them and fled, urging Bianca to head in another direction. But he was caught after running through a restaurant, creating havoc. Out in the back, an armed agent arrested him. When told he was wanted for making a false customs declaration in New York—he had failed to admit his prison record—he looked relieved. But when they added that he was also wanted in Vienna for murder, he began to sob.
Learning that he was also wanted in California, he chose to resist extradition to Europe and opt for a Los Angeles trial; however, when informed that California had the death penalty, he changed his mind.
The trial began in Vienna in April 1994, and in spite of overwhelming circumstantial evidence, the result was by no means a foregone conclusion. Unterweger had hundreds of admirers, who were convinced that the police had picked on him because they were blinded with prejudice by his past criminal record. And there was virtually no forensic evidence to link him to the crimes—merely a few red fibers that matched his scarf.
The part McCrary played in the prosecution proved to be central and vital. It was his task to explain to the court that the “signature” evidence amounted to overwhelming proof of Unterweger’s guilt. It was almost impossible, he told them, for eleven unconnected murders to be committed with an almost identical pattern—strangulation by underwear tied in a unique knot, and disposal in woodland in the same manner.
McCrary had even fed the “signature analysis” into the VICAP computer, which covered nearly twelve thousand murders from all over the United States. He had expected dozens of matches; instead, it came up with only four, one of which had been solved. The other three were the murders attributed to Unterweger.
When the defense asked him whether he had ever come across another case of a man who had frequent consensual sex getting involved with prostitutes, he was able to cite the case of Arthur Shawcross who, like Unterweger, had been in prison for fifteen years for murder, been released, and then murdered eleven prostitutes—in spite of having a wife and a girlfriend. The amazing parallel produced an obvious effect on the jury.
As the trial dragged on for two and a half months, McCrary watched Unterweger’s support eroding away as the public realized the strength of the evidence against him. In a speech in his own defense, Unterweger did not even attempt to counter it. He merely repeated his assertion that he had no reason to kill women, since he had every reason to stay out of jail. He conceded that he had once been “a primitive criminal who grunted rather than talked, and an inveterate liar.” But, he declared with passion, he was no longer that person.
But McCrary’s evidence left little doubt that he was exactly that person. And on June 28, 1999, the jury found Unterweger guilty on nine of the eleven counts of murder—in the remaining two cases the jury reasoned that the bodies were too decomposed for the cause of death to be established. Unterweger was obviously stunned; he had confidently expected an acquittal.
McCrary had one more contribution to make to the case. By now he knew enough about Unterweger to know that an ego like his would find it virtually impossible to accept the verdict. He had sworn that he would never return to prison. This time it would be for life; there would be no second chance of parole. Suicide would be his last defiant act, his last great “Fuck you!”
Unfortunately, this warning was not passed on to the prison guards. That night Jack Unterweger hanged himself in his cell with the cord of his jumpsuit.
For McCrary, the moral of the story is also the moral of this book: It is almost impossible for serial killers to change their spots.
