Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (46 page)

Despite the various infractions and problems with Woodcock, he gradually assumed a mask of stable sanity. He charmed the staff with his wit and intelligence in the same way he had charmed his schoolteachers three decades earlier. Psychiatric reports, however, consistently warned of his continued homicidal fantasies and characterized him as dangerous.

The problem was in the enormous political pressure on Ontario’s prison and psychiatric systems to release inmates into the community to make way for new incoming offenders. By 1990, some thirty-five years after the murders, it was felt that the middle-aged Woodcock, or Krueger as he was now known, should be reintroduced into society—to continue holding him would be tantamount to admitting that the therapy programs were a failure.

Despite the objections of some of the psychiatric staff, Woodcock was transferred to a medium-security psychiatric facility in the town of Brockville, near Kingston, Ontario. As part of the preparation for Woodcock’s release, hospital staff decided to issue him his first three-hour pass, allowing him to leave the hospital grounds, visit the town, buy a pizza, and bring it back to the facility. Woodcock, of course, would have to be escorted by somebody of his choice. Remarkably, under hospital rules, that person could be a former inmate of the facility. Woodcock nominated the recently released Bruce Hamill as his escort—a former “candidate” in Woodcock’s imaginary Brotherhood. Hamill had spent several years in the facility after stabbing his elderly female neighbor to death. He was now considered “cured” and out on parole.

The details of Woodcock’s and Hamill’s communications prior to the day of the pass are unknown, but on July 13, 1991, Hamill arrived in Brockville carrying a pipe wrench wrapped in newspapers. He first went to a drugstore, where he purchased an over-the-counter sleeping medicine frequently abused by addicts. Then he went to a “big-box” hardware store and bought a hunting knife, hatchet, and sleeping bag. He rolled up the pipe wrench and weapons into the sleeping bag and proceeded on to the hospital, carrying the sleeping bag with him. Nobody bothered to unroll the sleeping bag and search it. Peter Woodcock met him at reception. The two then went for a stroll on the hospital grounds and selected a densely wooded area near the perimeter. They seeded the bushes with the weapons and then returned to the hospital building.

On the way back, they ran into another inmate, twenty-seven-year-old Dennis Kerr. He was another aspirant for membership in Woodcock’s Brotherhood, and had been falsely promised by Woodcock a loan of five hundred dollars to buy a set of used drums. Woodcock told Kerr to meet him in the woods in an hour, and on the way into town he would give Kerr the money. Hamill and Woodcock returned to the hospital and filled out the paperwork for Woodcock’s first pass in thirty-five years. Instead of leaving through the gate, they strolled off to the edge of the hospital grounds and slipped into the bushes to wait for Kerr. As they waited, Hamill quickly got high on the sleeping medication.

When Dennis Kerr arrived as instructed, Woodcock struck him in the head with the pipe wrench and continued to beat him into unconsciousness. After the first blow, Kerr apparently cried out, “What did you do that for?”

Woodcock said:

I could barely lift the thing, let alone swing it. I did manage to do it, and I got Dennis in the head. I hit him again, after he asked his little profound question, this time from the front, and he fell down, but not without a struggle. He struggled nearly the whole time. He seemed to be afraid to die.
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Woodcock and Hamill seized the hatchet and knife hidden in the bushes and hacked and stabbed Kerr, mutilating his body, cutting it open, and nearly severing his head. Drenched in Kerr’s blood, they then stripped themselves naked and sodomized the corpse and chanted over it. This was Hamill’s initiation into the Brotherhood.

Hamill soon passed out from the drug, while Woodcock stood over his naked body and gently caressed it with the blade of the knife. He decided he was too tired to kill Hamill. Putting on his bloody clothing, Woodcock then left the hospital grounds, walked to a police station about two miles away, and turned himself in.

He brought the police back to the murder site, where Hamill was found still sleeping next to the corpse. Woodcock was kept in police custody that night, and they noted that he masturbated openly until early morning of the next day—at least six times in the first ten hours of custody. He finally fell asleep, only to be roused with a bacon-and-egg breakfast. Woodcock said:

Come the morning, I wake up, and they’re serving bacon and eggs because it’s Sunday. I haven’t had bacon and eggs in something like five years. And I thought to myself, “Fancy this, all I had to do to get bacon and eggs was commit murder. You literally have to kill somebody if you want a good breakfast in this system.”

So much for Peter Woodcock’s first three hours of provisional freedom. Woodcock and Hamill were granted an insanity plea in December 1992 and sent back to where they came from—where they are once again being routinely evaluated for their suitability for release.

One really has difficulty summarizing Peter Woodcock’s story without the word
evil
crossing the page. What other possible explanation can one have for the thirty-five years separating his first three murders and what was hopefully his last murder? What seems to happen is that confinement, whether in a psychiatric facility or a prison, somehow arrests the evolution of a serial killer’s compulsion to kill. It doesn’t cure it—just freezes it like a bacterial culture until freedom thaws it out and he begins from where he left off. This phenomenon has been noticed in several cases where killers were profiled as being younger than they actually were, their killing maturity was suspended by a prison sentence until their release, and they picked up from where they were the day they were arrested. Two years after his fourth murder, back in a maximum-security hospital, Woodcock-Krueger explained:

I grew up here. My personality reflects the influences here, and I’m accused of having no morality, which is a fair assessment, because my morality is whatever the system allows, whatever I can get away with. In a setting like this, the people to fear are the staff, not God.
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 Edmund Kemper—Serial Killer “Burn Out”

Perhaps one of the most studied serial killers, after Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy, is Edmund Emil Kemper III of Santa Cruz, California. He was born in 1948 and was raised by an extremely domineering mother who often berated him in public. At age eight he was disciplined by his mother by being forced to sleep in a dark cellar for eight months, his only exit a trap-door in the floor on which usually stood the kitchen table. When Ed was nine his father left, apparently unable to deal with his wife’s domineering personality. Ed’s mother constantly told him that he reminded her of his father—whom she hated.

At age ten, Ed Kemper was above average in size and his mother became obsessed with the thought that he would molest his sister. He was now sent back into the basement to sleep, locked in every night while his mother and sister slept in their bedrooms. His response was to kill the family cat by burying it alive. Afterward he cut the cat’s head off and mounted it on a stick. When his sister received a doll for Christmas, Ed cut off the doll’s head and hands.

When he was twelve his favorite game was “gas chamber,” in which he asked his sister to tie him up and throw an imaginary switch. Ed tumbled over and writhed on the floor, pretending to be dying of gas.

One day his sister teased him that he liked his schoolteacher and wanted to kiss her. Ed replied, “If I kissed her I’d have to kill her first.” He recalled that as a little boy he would sneak out of his house and, armed with his father’s bayonet, go to his second-grade teacher’s house and watch her through the windows. He fantasized about killing her and then making love to her corpse.

Ed was highly intelligent—his IQ was measured at 145, near-genius level. He also was abnormally tall for his age. At age thirteen he ran away from home to find his father. When he was returned he killed another family cat by cutting off the top of its skull with a machete and exposing its brains. He kept pieces of the cat in his closet until his mother found them.

Afterward his mother sent him to live with his paternal grandparents on their farm in the foothills of the California Sierras. There, like many boys living in a rural region, Ed was given a .22-caliber rifle for hunting. But when Ed began killing domestic farm animals and pets, his grandparents took the rifle away from him.

In August 1963, when Ed Kemper was fifteen, he suddenly killed both his grandparents. As his grandmother sat at the kitchen table reviewing children’s stories she had written, Ed shot her in the head with the .22-caliber rifle. He fired two more shots into her back and then stabbed her repeatedly. He waited for his grandfather to come home and then shot him dead in the yard as he was coming up to the house. Afterward he phoned his mother and told her what he had done and calmly waited for the police to arrive. When asked at the time why he had committed the crimes, he replied, “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot grandma.”

Kemper was confined at the Atascadero State Hospital in the criminally insane unit. There California Youth Authority psychiatrists and social workers strongly disagreed with the court psychiatrist’s diagnosis. Their reports maintained that he showed “no flight of ideas, no interference with thought, no expression of delusions or hallucinations, and no evidence of bizarre thinking.” He was diagnosed as having “personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive type.”

Kemper was such an endearing model prisoner and so intelligent that the staff trained him to administer psychiatric tests to other prisoners. Kemper later admitted that being able to understand how these tests functioned allowed him to manipulate his psychiatrists. Kemper also said that he learned a lot from the many sex offenders to whom he administrated tests; for example, he learned that it was important to kill witnesses after a rape. His psychiatrist meanwhile commented, “He was a very good worker and this is
not
typical of a sociopath. He really took pride in his work.”

After five years, Kemper was certified no longer a danger to the public and released at age twenty-one to live with his mother. “They paroled me right back to mama,” Kemper recalls. “Well, my mother and I started right in on horrendous battles, just horrible battles, violent and vicious.”

His mother worked at the time as an administrator at the University of California in Santa Cruz and was a popular and helpful person at the campus. At home, however, Kemper claimed she was vicious and tormenting. Now divorced for the third time, she blamed her troubles on Ed, telling him, “because of you, my murderous son, I haven’t had sex with a man for five years.”
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By now Kemper was a six-foot-nine-inch, 280-pound behemoth. His wish was to join the California Highway Patrol. His mother attempted to have his juvenile homicide record sealed so that he could join the police, but in the end he was rejected for being too big. Nonetheless, Kemper went to restaurants and bars frequented by police officers and often joined in their discussions and sat with them at the table. When he began killing, he got inside information on the course of the investigation. One police officer even gave him a police academy trainee’s badge and identification card. He was so well liked and respected by the Santa Cruz police that when he telephoned to confess to killing and mutilating eight women, the police at first thought he was drunk and joking and refused to take his call seriously.

Kemper found a job with the California Highway Department and moved to a small apartment of his own. He complained that he still could not get away from his mother, that she constantly phoned him and paid him surprise visits. Kemper described using his “Atascadero learning” to “push her toward where she would be a nice motherly type and quit being such a damned manipulating, controlling beast.”

During this period, Kemper made regular required visits to his probation psychiatrist. At the same time he started rehearsing for his upcoming series of kills. He is known to have picked up dozens of young women hitchhiking in the Santa Cruz area, developing a nonthreatening “gentle giant” persona. Later Kemper confessed that when he stopped in front of a female hitchhiker and she appeared unsure of getting into his car, he deliberately glanced at his watch. Kemper explained that this gesture subtly transmitted to the woman the message that he was a busy man and that she was of minor interest to him. Manipulation and control are the primary talents fueling the psychopathic serial killer.