Kolchak: The Night Stalker: A Black and Evil Truth (10 page)

“While this was happening, the other orderly, William Benson, came upon the trio and he, too, grabbed at the man. Benson, who weighs 220 pounds, wrestled the man to the floor and had him pinned momentarily. But the man pushed him off, grabbed Benson’s arm and threw him against the nearest wall. Then he rammed Benson’s head against the floor until he, too, was unconscious.

“After that, he apparently left the hospital unseen, by way of another exit. The admissions nurse does not recall seeing him again. The three injured parties were discovered a short time later.

“Clark County Sheriff Reese Lane has ordered that all roadblocks be tripled in strength and that checkpoints be stepped up at all bus terminals, at the Union Pacific Railroad Station and at McCarran Airport. All vehicles entering or leaving the area will be searched as will all persons and baggage at the airport.

“Persons with any information on the suspect’s whereabouts are urged to contact the Las Vegas Police Department or the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.

“Citizens are cautioned not to try to apprehend the suspect. He should be considered extremely dangerous. He is believed to be responsible for the killings of at least four persons in this area since April 25 and is definitely responsible for injuring seriously the three persons mentioned here.”

There wasn’t much for me to do so I thanked Meyer and checked with “Bat” Masterson at the PD and then with Jenks at the sheriff’s office.

Then I sat down to begin my research. There were nearly three dozen books in the carton. About twenty were paperbacks. There were books dealing with ancient myths, legends and folktales, books that dealt almost exclusively with vampirism and lycanthropy, and a hefty volume on witchcraft thrown in for good measure. There were also some books dealing with factual material: criminal cases of actual “human monsters” taken from police files starting way back in the early 1800s and running right through to the Sharon Tate murders.

It was easy to see I’d never get through the mass of material in one weekend, let alone collate, condense and classify it into something workable, for I had already half-formed in my mind a report I’d give to my publisher as the basis for a feature story, as well as to the lawdogs as the basis for some possible insights into the nature of the man they were hunting. (Obviously, it was not my place to do so, as Dr. Mokurji had pointed out indirectly at the May 12 inquest. Neither he nor I were “criminal psychologist” but, then, it didn’t seem to me at the time that anyone else would bother to attack the problem from this angle.)

So, I started going through my phone numbers. I called Ella Paul, one of our paper’s “librarians” who was home on her day off. I explained the situation and told her if she couldn’t get overtime for her work for me that I’d pay her out of my own pocket. After some hesitation, she agreed, and I told her to come on over and bring enough food for five people in the form of cold cuts, beer and a couple of loaves of bread. Also a large can of coffee. I promised to pay her on arrival.

Next, I called Lester Jansen, at his apartment two doors down from me. Jansen was a refugee from a newspaper strike in L.A. and had come here to work for the competition down the street. He was taking some vacation time and just laying around watching old movies on TV and drinking. He said he couldn’t care less about vampires and the like but a promise of all the booze he could drink brought him on up with a half-ream of paper and his Olivetti portable.

Then I called Sam’s answering service and left a message for her to get back to me as soon as possible.

A call to the university brought two young, third-year students name Hooper and Curtis who agreed to work for ten dollars a day plus sandwiches and beer. They promised to show up at 5:00 sharp.

Ella got to my place an hour later, then Hooper and Curtis (I never did learn their first names) who worked hard and each earned a five dollar bonus.

We were well into it by 6:00 P.M. when Sam called. I left the crowd in the living room and took the call upstairs in my den. After I explained what I wanted she asked me if I was nuts. Did I know how much money she would be turning down on a Friday night to read some old books? And why did I think she would be interested anyway?

I told her I could never hope to justify the effort on a monetary basis, adding that she’d be giving up at least $400 and possibly more to help a friend something like “Are you that hard up for a piece of tail that you’d cook up a crazy story like this just to deprive a poor working girl of her hard-earned dollars?” With that, she hung up without waiting for a reply. But at 7:30 she showed up with a friend and fellow worker and both agreed to work on it until midnight if they could use the place to change clothes in so that they could catch their prospective “johns” after the late shows on the Strip.

Sam is a little bit crazy sometimes. And very nice. I can’t explain why she helped out but I can say this: when her friend left just after midnight, Sam stayed. It probably sounds ridiculous, here in black and white, but it’s the God’s honest truth. My little hooker gave up one of her two busiest “working nights” of the week to help me sort through a bunch of old books.

At 7:50 or thereabout I remembered about the play at UNLV and decided to leave my eager crew to their labors. I mumbled something about going to check out a lead on a story and headed out to the university. I figured on taking one more crack at Reynolds after the show. It was only a hunch but, at the time, I was sure he knew something. When I got there I called the office and told them the number of the pay phone nearest the theatre entrance and asked that they call me if anything broke. Six rings would do it. If I sat nearest the door I’d hear it and call back.

I got inside when the doors were just closing and the houselights were already dimmed. I settled back to enjoy the antics of a caricatured Henry the Eighth as he loved and betrayed his first few wives.

CHAPTER 9

FRIDAY, MAY 15, 1970

EVENING

The call came just after intermission and, as I was just finishing a drink from the nearby fountain, I caught the phone on the third ring. It was a new man who was working in the composing room who’d gotten the call from the PD. The newsroom had emptied like a plagued city just ten minutes before. The switchboard operator had put him through to me.

“I don’t know what’s up,” he began, “but the police department reports a body in the ladies’ room of the Crown movie theater, downtown. The call here came from a Captain Masterson and he said if you could be reached you’d know what it was all about.”

I did and was on my way in thirty seconds flat, heading up Tropicana and down the freeway to Charleston Boulevard. It took me less than ten minutes to get downtown and another two to convince the uniformed police on hand that I was a legitimate reporter and please could I double park for a few minutes.

Masterson spotted me and nodded for me to come over. I followed him inside and on the way paused at the cashier’s window to call Stefan who was dining with his wife at the Moby Dick Restaurant, as was his Friday custom. I told him what was up and he agreed to hustle down and take a few shots.

The Crown is a twenty-hear-old Fremont Street movie house that was just recently sold to a large chain. The transition had been so recent that the only sign of change was the new name, Crown, above the marquee.

Directly off the thirty-by-forty-foot foyer were two curving stairways of about a half-dozen steps each that led to the restrooms. The ticket taker Georgia Atkins, had gone to the john only to find it occupied. When its occupant didn’t leave after nearly thirty minutes, Miss Atkins tried to find out if she was all right. When there was no answer, she forced open the door and found a young girl, who looked to be about eighteen, seated, leaning against the partition. She was very pale and very dead. She was also fully dressed and the ticket taker couldn’t figure out why she was sitting there “of all places.” She called the night manager who called the police.

The uniformed police had made the discovery of the two holes in the girl’s neck and they’d called for Masterson who was in charge of the PD’s half of the combined forces unit investigating those murders involving neck punctures. The police photographers arrived in tandem with the fingerprint people and soon after, Stefan pushed his way into the crowded area. Masterson took the girl’s purse and checked the ID as we headed back to the foyer.

I took down the information along with a warning not to talk about the neck punctures. But we were all in for a little surprise.

The “girl” turned out to be a man, one Stephen Hemphill, twenty-three, an unemployed hairdresser who, it later turned out, was something of a well-known drag queen in local police files. He had no record of sex offenses, but had been picked up twice in the past year “cruising” the downtown area and had been politely invited to leave town. He should have taken the invitation.

He was blond, five-nine, and weighed about 145. There was a small amount of blood at the base of his skull beneath his Dynel wig where he’d been struck into unconsciousness. Aside from this one trace, and the unusual fact that this appeared to be the “vampire’s” first male victim, I suspected that the coroner’s autopsy would be the same. And I knew that it would be withheld from the public.

As Masterson’s people turned back the few curious souls who’d left the movie in progress in search of popcorn and become interested in the police action in the foyer, I called Vincenzo at home and gave him the preliminary report adding that we’d have pictures and asking if it was worth another “extra.” He told me it might be, at least as far as trying to get an edition on the streets with a partially replated front page. But that was as far as he felt he would go. We did, in fact, kill the regular 10L30 edition which was already on the presses, and get out the new front page in time to catch the midnight patrons on the Strip. I told him I’d drop off my copy at the office and leave it on his desk and that Stefan would leave the photos with the copy.

Then I called home to check on my “crew” who were grumbling that the beer had run out. I told them that help was on the way and asked for Sam. I told her in strict confidence what had happened downtown and said I’d be back in an hour. She said she’d stick around and that everyone was hard at work and to get the hell back and do my share.

As I left the Crown for home I turned to look at the ambulance removing Hemphill’s body and noticed the marquee: “Dracula Returns.” It seemed an apt comment and would have made a great headline if we’d been allowed to print the whole truth. As it was, it was a fitting epitaph for Hemphill.

When the copy was duly deposited and Stefan had pulled the first contact prints out of the soup, I left and stopped off at the Mayfair Market across from Foxy’s to get the beer, a fifth of White Horse, and several varieties of Danish from Freed’s bakery. I got back and we divvied up the food while I explained what had happened to the rest of them, adding that it was the fifth murder and that police still didn’t know how it was done and hadn’t caught the guy who did it.

At midnight Sam’s friend left and so did Ella who has a small but growing family and had a baby-sitter to take home. Hooper and Curtis stuck it out until 4:00 and by sunrise Sam called “time” and pointed to the bedroom. I watched her undulate up the stairway, cursed my cold, and followed. By the time I got there she was already in bed. I lost no time in following suit and found her under the sheets to be very warm and very naked.

“Easy, Simon Legree,” she cautioned. “I’ll think about catching your cold after we’ve had some sleep.”

As I said before, Sam and I had an understanding, a friendship. When we were both in the mood we brightened each other’s lives a bit. When the occasion wasn’t just right, as it seemed to me then, neither of us forced the issue. It’s a good way to lose friends. So I kissed her lightly on the forehead, hoping my germs would be gone by “morning,” then rolled over and set the alarm for 1:30 and killed the light.

We both woke up around noon. She had slept well and I felt like a new man. She snuggled up close to me and we found ways of occupying the time until the alarm went off, after which she joined me in the shower and then made me one hell of a good breakfast, the first homemade one I’d had in that apartment since she’d helped me celebrate Christmas morning in ’69. A quick swim and another shower followed, and then we spent an hour or so sorting the notes left by my “research fellows.” Then Sam said good-by and I called Jensen who had disappeared around 2:00 AM unnoticed by anyone. He came up looking like death warmed over with a hangover that wouldn’t quit. I brewed him a fresh pot of coffee, stuffed some toast into him, and we spent a couple of hours together sorting what was left and beginning to type up my report.

I now had a fairly good idea of how close legend and fact could come. I’m including some of what I pieced together to show you that what followed over the next few days was not entirely unexpected.

CHAPTER 10

[What follows here is an extremely condensed version of nearly 300 pages of typewritten notes on the several volumes researched by Kolchak and his “staff.” I have included the most basic information on vampirism, and only the most famous of the criminal cases involving “bloodlust.” JR]

Since the beginnings of man’s existence there have been “creatures of the night” who have been accorded supernatural powers. Cavemen probably sat around their fires and conjured up great man-beasts that thirsted for human blood.

These “campfire stories” and the unrecorded acts of certain demented individuals in the days of prehistory, pre-police and pre-psychology gave way and gave rise to the folktales that abound with vampires, werewolves and witches. These legends have, today, grown into a sizeable body of fiction which, in turn, has for some years supported an entire segment of the motion picture industry which at times, in cycles like the moon, has rivaled even the production of westerns.

Of the blood-crazed monsters that have tracked their bloody prints through the pages of fiction, the vampires and werewolves are the best known. There is, however, a basic difference between the vampire and the werewolf. The werewolf changes from human into animal form. The vampire always remains “human.” The werewolf is almost exclusively a person who becomes one either voluntarily or through the bite of another werewolf. But in either case, he has never been dead. On the other hand, a vampire, who becomes such from the bite of another vampire but not the complete draining of his (or her) blood, first “dies” and is reborn into an “undead” state. And, with the exception of psychological paralysis induced by fear or by hypnotism, a person never becomes a vampire voluntarily.

Legend has it that St. Patrick himself once changed a Welsh king into a werewolf for reasons that are lost to modern historians. Although there are several versions of the modus operandi of werewolves, most authorities agree that they kill out of lust, not just the need to drink blood. They don’t need blood to survive. And, in many cases, they are totally unconscious of their animalistic acts. They are universally recognized as being unaccountably brutal. Moreover, the activities of werewolves are somewhat predictable as they are “activated” by the full moon. At other times they lead relatively normal lives thus supposedly making them harder to find and destroy. Various methods have been mentioned as being effective means of disposing of them. With the invention of firearms, the most popular device is a pistol or rifle loaded with silver bullets and aimed at the heart.

The vampire, however, is an altogether different proposition. He or she becomes a vampire involuntarily and dies only to arise each and every night to drink the blood necessary to maintain the human “body” in its “undead” state during daylight hours. (Interestingly enough, female vampires seem to dominate much of vampiric literature to the extent of giving rise to the once-popular slang expression “vampire” or “vamp,” indicating a female “bloodsucker” who literally drains men (sexually and financially) of their substance.).

At night the vampire is almost virtually omnipotent, fearing only, according to most accounts of the last two millennia, the sight of the cross, i.e., a crucifix. During the day, they lie dormant and are almost totally helpless. In this sleeping state they can be easily disposed of by hammering a stake made of wood through their “human” hearts and (according to some) cutting off their heads afterwards. They can also die if sprinkled heavily with Holy Water or if exposed for any length of time to the direct rays of the sun. The loss of their native soil, with which their “coffins” are lined, can cause them no end of misery, and, if they are far from home, will eventually lead to their wandering about in the daytime and dying. According to legend, the soul of the vampire cannot go to heaven (or hell) until the vampire’s body has been properly destroyed.

Virtually every culture in every section of the world has its vampire legends. The vampire’s genesis appears in the times of the ancient Hebrews who called her Lillith and even farther back in pre-Hebraic Babylon where she was known as Lilitu. The ancient Greeks called her Lamia and she had the upper torso and head of a woman and the lower half of a snake, wings, and flew through the night to suck the blood of children. (A variation of the winged-serpent concept may be found in the Quetzalcoatl of the ancient Aztecs.) The Romans called the vampire Strix. In plural it was Strigae which evolved into the modern Italian Strega for witch. Vampire legends have been recorded in great variety in India, Malaysia and Arabia. In the tales of the Arabian Nights there is the account of Sinbad the Sailor who encountered “one-eyed monsters” like Odysseus’ Cyclops, Polyphemus, but these one-eyed creatures roasted their victims before eating them. The Chinese, too, have vampire legends, all filled with blood and terror.

And, of course, there are the legends of Central Europe.

“Dracula,” it turns out, was indeed a real man. Actually, a whole line of “royalty” in the region known as Wallachia (now Rumania) existed in the 1400s. It seems that Vlad III of Wallachia, a sort of warlord, was elevated to the rank of Voivode (a “count” or local king) in the year 1431 by King Sigismund, later the Holy Roman Emperor. In becoming Voivode, Vlad automatically joined Sigismund’s Order of the Dragon, a special coterie of knights, and served as the head of Wallachia’s puppet government. Information about Vlad III mentions him as being extremely vicious and bloodthirsty. His subjects came to believe he was possessed of the devil and considered the dragon symbol on his tunic as a sign of this.

When the Turks conquered Wallachia in the 1450s they set up his son, Vlad IV, as their puppet ruler. He was even more cruel; so brutal in fact, that he became a legend in his own time. Vlad IV became the Hitler of his day. When he wasn’t impaling people on stakes (his favorite pastime from all accounts) he had his unlucky victims ground live into hamburger, chopped up in to “sausage” and literally “shot from guns.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica says he is reported to “have feasted amongst his impaled victims.” All reports of his activities make Nero look like a truant from a nursery school by comparison.

As talk of his bloodlust grew, and the connection between the dragon on his tunic and the talk of his allegiance with the devil spread, a new name was given to him stemming from the Hungarian word for dragon–Dracula! The word has its root in the Latin draco, and can be found in Italian as gradulia, and in German as trakle.

However, after years of his bloodletting, Voivode Vlad IV (Dracula) went too far and stuck a stake through an ambassador and his ruler, Sultan Majomet of Turkey, became so enraged at the news that he personally led the army that deposed Dracula and the “vampire” was thought to have died in exile. However Mahomet reckoned without Dracula’s powers of recuperation and Dracula returned in 1475 to reclaim his throne, giving further rise to the idea of a vampire returning from the dead. When Dracula was again deposed a year later, he died one final time.

Most of the legends built up in the general area of Hungary and Rumania finally congealed into the familiar version of the vampire as seen by author Bram Stoker in his famous Dracula of the 1890’s. This vampire is almost always a nobleman, tall, thin, pale, with red-rimmed eyes, a mouth full of fangs, blood-red lips and total power during the hours of darkness. Such a creature inevitably gives off a foul stench, particularly from his mouth. (That certainly fit our suspect.) He has the power to paralyze with fright, to create others of his kind by merely biting them, or by hypnotizing victims, unbitten, to create slaves.

Although I found this information very interesting, I still wondered whether I was on the right track. On the one hand, no one has ever scientifically proven vampires to be nonexistent. But then no one has ever gotten one in the lab to study.

Still, if the legends seem to some people too insubstantial to be believed, the factual cases from police files seem hardly less bloodthirsty and, in many cases, a whole lot more disgusting. While there is no account (among those we researched so hastily) of a documented case of any of those I will mention here as having fangs or a coffin for a resting place, the people I am about to list disposed of all manner of victims–small animals, men, women and children–often drinking their blood, or eating them, or selling pieces of their bodies as meatcutter’s products. Sometimes sex offenses were involved. The late Dr. Ernest Jones, of the Freudian school of psychiatry, felt the vampire belief contained portions of most sexual deviations but stemmed from infancy when the sex drive has not yet been centralized at the sexual organs and satisfaction is obtained largely through sucking and biting. He contended such people who acted like vampires were expressing sex drives of an infantile nature.

Sometimes witchcraft and Satan worship was involved. But always, blood was spilled in copious amounts.

“Jack the Ripper” is probably the most famous of the documented police cases. He is the archetypical fiend; the slayer of helpless women in the dead of night. While legends have grown up around this bloody figure to indicate he may have been responsible for as many as twenty vicious slayings in as many years, the police reports and newspaper accounts of the day would put the more likely number at seven, all dying in the year 1888.

London also had a “vampire” appear shortly after World War II in South Kensington. He was a mild-looking man named John George Haigh, and before he was through on February 18, 1949, he had shot a Mrs. Durand-Deacon with a .38, sliced open her neck, filled a drinking glass with her blood, downed it and dumped her body in a tank filled with thirty gallons of sulphuric acid. Afterward, according to his own testimony, he went out to tea. He also took her jewelry which he pawned and which led the police to arrest him, at which time he admitted his crime saying, “No trace of her can ever be found. I did the same with the Hendersons and the McSwans.”

Without going into lengthy detail, let it be enough to say that the police amassed enough evidence to have Haigh hanged because according to British law, he could not plead insanity as long as he knew the nature and quality of his deed. He admitted that he did know, and that he had gained financially as a result of his murderous activities. The rope finished him as surely as a stake through the heart.

In Hanover, Germany, in 1925, Fritz Haarmann went on trial for his life and before it was over, the one-time soldier and ex-police stooge admitted to killing between thirty and forty victims, mostly teen-aged boys whom he raped and while doing so, tore out their throats with his teeth. His death at the hands of a sword-wielding executioner was well within the bounds of tradition in the disposal of vampires. His head was cut off.

And then there was the infamous Peter Kurten, known variously as “The Dusseldorf Vampire” and “The Dusseldorf Child Killer.” Kurten was basically a sneak thief and petty burglar who got his sexual release from murdering young children, especially girls, by strangulation or by the knife, often drinking their blood. He started as a child on small animals like squirrels after he discovered he felt intense pleasure when he saw animals slaughtered. Soon he graduated to bigger game, killing two of his male playmates at age nine by pushing them off a raft into the Rhine River and holding them under until they drowned.

The greatest sexual thrill of his early life was an unsuccessful strangling attempt on a young girl. After his bungling of the job in the Grafenburg Woods, he followed her for days until he was arrested and sent to prison for four years. He had been active from 1889 until 1908. After his release and until May of 1930, he killed no less than twenty-three times!

He was fascinated by the act of stabbing and could achieve an orgasm only when engaged in the act. He once stabbed a child he had already strangled to death–stabbed her 36 times. He was even more fascinated by dripping or spurting blood and would often drink it. Yet he was described as “fastidious,” a very clean man who was so careful in his crimes that laboratory analysis of his clothing was necessary to detect evidence of his handiwork. And he was “a good Catholic” who said his prayers regularly and thought abortion a “sin.”

While awaiting execution he received many letters from women confessing their love for him and their desire for marriage. (While on trial for the Sharon Tate killings Charles Manson also received such letters.)

Like Haarmann, he was executed by beheading. And, in 1931, in a slightly disguised version of his “career,” Kurten was resurrected by film director Fritz Lang in the movie classic, M starring a little-known Hungarian Jew named Peter Lorre, one of the original vampires of Brecht and Weill’s The Three Penny Opera.

In the Paris of 1847-48, a large number of corpses, particularly those of young woman, were either stolen or dug up and mutilated on the spot by human teeth.

The teeth belonged to a demented army sergeant named Bertrand, who, when caught, confessed to the overwhelming desire to mutilate and devour corpses, chewing their flesh and entrails and then, according to some accounts, when covered with gore, rending and mutilating his handiwork. Before he was captured he managed to have sexual intercourse with at least one, mutilated, partially eaten body. He spent a year in jail and disappeared after his release.

There have been numerous jokes about the butcher who served up his victims as “choice cuts” to his morning customers. This, too, can be traced to actual fact. Between 1921 and 1924, some thirty persons disappeared without a trace in Munsterberg, Silesia, Germany, Eventually, the trail led to Herr Denke, a quiet religious man who pumped the bellows for the organ in the local church. In a time of general starvation and unbelievable inflation, when twelve-million German marks (often carted in wheelbarrows) might buy a loaf of stale, moldy bread, people were not at all adverse to chopping up horses, cats and dogs to survive. Denke went one step further to insure a steady supply of meat on the table. He chopped up thirty of his neighbors. After his arrest he decided not to await a trial and quietly hanged himself in his cell.