The Serial Killer Files (10 page)

The end of his horrific career came when one of his accomplices was busted for another crime and, as part of a plea deal, pointed the finger at Bonin, who was immediately placed under round-the-clock surveillance. Within twenty-four hours, police arrested him for sodomizing a fifteen-year-old boy. Bonin eventually confessed to twenty-one murders and was given the death sentence. During the next seventeen years, while he tried every legal maneuver to have his sentence overturned, he painted, read, wrote letters to the families of his victims, and played bridge with other serial killers, including Randy Kraft. He was finally put to death by lethal injection on February 23, 1996.

I’d still be killing. I couldn’t stop killing. It got easier each time.

—William Bonin after his arrest, when asked by a reporter what he would do if he were still at large Larry Eyler

Two years after the capture of Southern California’s “Freeway Killer,” a homicidal sadist with a strikingly similar MO sent shock waves through gay communities across the Midwest. Dubbed the

“Highway Murderer,” his real name was Larry Eyler. For nearly two years, he cruised the interstates of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, stopping at small-town pubs, red-light districts, gay bars, and even the occasional upscale, residential neighborhood. Night after night, he hunted for prey—male, generally white and young, and desperate for something: cash, company, or just a ride. Between late 1982 and mid-1984—while local police, state troopers, and FBI agents crossed signals, missed evidence, and botched investigations—Eyler had his unspeakable way with nearly two dozen victims, dumped their mutilated corpses just off the open highways, then kept driving.

He first struck in the fall of 1982, savaging two young men and discarding their remains in Indiana and Illinois. Two more bodies were found in December. In his murderous frenzy, the killer slashed his victims’ throats and bellies, leaving their entrails hanging out. He had also left a bizarre, ritualistic

“signature”: in several cases, white tube socks, not belonging to the victims, were found on their feet.

Throughout the spring of 1983, more trussed and butchered bodies turned up in the neighboring states.

Despite calls for action from the gay communities of Chicago and Indianapolis, police were slow to acknowledge that a homosexual lust-killer was on the loose. It was not until May 1983—when the

“Highway Murderer” had already claimed ten victims—that a task force was organized to investigate the crimes. The nameless executioner was profiled as a violently self-loathing gay whose atrocities were a way of striking out at the homosexuality he hated and feared in himself.

It wasn’t long before thirty-one-year-old Eyler was identified as a prime suspect by a young man named Mark Henry, who, several years earlier, had been handcuffed at knifepoint by Eyler after accepting a ride in his pickup truck, then stabbed when he tried to escape. Several months after police received this tip, Eyler was arrested when an Indiana State Trooper spotted him emerging from the woods with a partially bound young man. A search of Eyler’s pickup truck turned up a batch of incriminating evidence: surgical tape, nylon rope, and a hunting knife stained with what proved to be human blood.

However—in one of those legal decisions that drive strict law-and-order types crazy—the search was ruled illegal and Eyler set free.

Like other serial killers who believe, in their overweening arrogance, that they can outwit the law forever, Eyler—knowing full well that he was under surveillance—continued to kill. He wasn’t stopped for good until August 21, 1984, when the janitor of a Chicago apartment building discovered the body parts of a dismembered male in several gray plastic trash bags and Eyler was fingered as the person who had dumped them there.

Convicted and sentenced to death, Eyler tried to bargain with authorities. In exchange for a lesser punishment, he confessed to several unsolved murders and also named another man—Robert Little, a fifty-three-year-old library science professor at Indiana University—as an accomplice in one of the mutilation-killings. Little was ultimately tried and acquitted. Eyler died of AIDS in March 1996, having confessed to twenty-one murders.

William MacDonald, the Sydney Mutilator

In 1926, Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. He would grow up to be a major cultural force in 1960s America, a pioneer of gay liberation who celebrated his homosexuality and wrote some of the most influential poetry of the late twentieth century.

Two years earlier, another boy with the same name was born in Liverpool, England. He, too, would end up in the history books—though not as a poet and certainly not as an icon of sexual tolerance. A tormented gay who hated and feared his own sexual orientation, this other Allen Ginsberg would turn out to be one of the most ghastly murderers in recent history, a lust-killer so savagely violent that he came to be known as “the Mutilator.”

In later life, he would blame his troubles, rather conveniently, on an incident that occurred in 1943, when

—during a stint in the army—he was raped in an air-raid shelter by a fellow soldier. The problem with this story—besides the fact that there is no proof of its truth—is that Ginsberg had already been diagnosed as a schizophrenic long before it supposedly happened.

Discharged from the army in 1947, he soon found himself committed to a mental asylum in Scotland, where he spent six nightmarish months crammed inside a freezing cell with gibbering madmen and subjected to a daily regimen of shock treatments. Shortly after he emerged from this bedlam, he left Great Britain, emigrating first to Canada, then to Australia, where he dropped his birth name and took on the identity that would gain lasting infamy in the annals of crime: William MacDonald.

In 1960, the thirty-six-year-old MacDonald, living in Brisbane, committed his first murder when he picked up a fifty-five-year-old alcoholic named Amos Hurst. Accompanying Hurst to a sleazy hotel, MacDonald strangled him as they sat together on a bed drinking beer.

The experience was powerfully stimulating for MacDonald and left with him a craving for more. At the start of 1961, he moved to Sydney. By day, he worked in the post office as a letter sorter, while at night he prowled parks and public toilets, looking for homosexual pickups.

Six months after arriving in Sydney, he was overcome with the urge to kill. Carrying a bag containing a long-bladed knife and a lightweight plastic raincoat, he lured a forty-one-year-old homeless man named Alfred Reginald Greenfield to a deserted swimming pool and plied him with beer until Greenfield passed out. Then—after donning the raincoat—MacDonald killed the unconscious derelict with dozens of stab wounds to the face and neck, severing his jugular. He then stripped Greenfield naked from the waist down and sliced off his genitals, which he took away with him and threw into the harbor.

After another six-month hiatus—or “cooling-off period,” in the jargon of criminology—MacDonald’s blood hunger again reached an overwhelming pitch. In November 1941, he butchered another forty-one-year-old male pickup named Ernest Cobbin, slashing the latter’s throat as he sat on a public toilet, then castrating him and carrying away the grisly trophy in a plastic bag, which he later tossed into Sydney Harbor.

A nearly identical atrocity followed in March 1962. By then, a massive manhunt was under way for the maniac known as the “Mutilator.” Shortly afterward, having been evicted by his landlord and sacked from his job, MacDonald moved to a suburb of Sydney. He took on a new name—Alan Brennan—and opened a sandwich shop. He perpetrated his final horror that November, when he brought a forty-two-year-old derelict, James Hackett, back to his shop. Rendering him stuporous with drink, he butchered and mutilated him. Afterward, he hid the corpse in the basement and—in a panic—fled the city for Brisbane.

When the badly decomposed corpse was discovered more than a month later, it was mistakenly identified as that of the shop owner, Alan Brennan. The cause of death was given as accidental electrocution. Had MacDonald stayed away, he would have remained free to kill again. Instead, for unexplained reasons, he returned to Sydney, where he soon bumped into an acquaintance named John McCarthy, who was understandably startled to see the supposedly deceased Brennan walking around on the streets. When MacDonald turned and fled, McCarthy notified the press. It wasn’t long before a leading newspaper ran the story under the headline, “THE CASE OF THE WALKING CORPSE.”

Exhuming the remains of “Brennan,” authorities now determined that the dead man was really James Hackett and that he had been stabbed to death and sexually mutilated. They became convinced that the real Brennan was the notorious “Mutilator.” Before long, MacDonald was arrested in Melbourne and brought back to Sydney. At his 1963 trial, he was found guilty of four counts of murder and given life in prison, where he passes his days reading literary classics and listening to Chopin, Liszt, and Gilbert and Sullivan.

BLOODTHIRSTY “BI”S

While most sadistic lust-murderers prefer victims of either their own or the opposite sex, a few can be classified as bisexual. The extravagantly perverted Albert Fish, for example, derived as much twisted pleasure from raping and castrating young boys as he did from torturing and cannibalizing little girls.

Thirty years earlier, in the late 1890s, an equally depraved monster roamed the French countryside, preying on victims of both sexes. He has long been forgotten, though his crimes were even more appalling than those of his contemporary, Jack the Ripper. His name was Joseph Vacher.

In contrast to certain psychopaths whose pleasant looks belie their depraved minds—Ted Bundy, for example, or Jeffrey Dahmer—Vacher’s physical appearance was as repulsive as his soul. One side of his face was paralyzed, his right eye exuded a steady flow of pus, his lips were contorted and scarred. These deformities were the result of a self-inflicted wound sustained at twenty-four when—after shooting a woman who had spurned him—he turned the pistol on himself and fired into his own head. His appearance was sufficiently disquieting to cause people to flinch when they saw him. Vacher, in the self-pitying way of most psychopaths, would later claim that he had been driven to commit his hideous crimes because the world was so very mean to him—a dubious assertion since his sadistic tendencies had manifested themselves long before the failed suicide attempt that made his features so revolting.

Born in 1869, he took great pleasure in torturing animals as a child and showed the kind of precocious interest in sex typical of future serial killers. At school, he enjoyed introducing his little playmates to mutual masturbation. In his late adolescence, he joined a monastery but was promptly expelled for encouraging the same practice, along with sodomy, among the novice monks.

After a stint in the army—during which he terrorized his fellow soldiers with unprovoked outbursts of near-homicidal rage—the incident occurred that left him disfigured for life. Rebuffed by a young woman he proposed to, he shot her three times, then turned the gun on himself. The young woman survived, as did Vacher, who was committed to an insane asylum and treated for “persecution mania.” Incredibly, he was declared cured after less than a year and discharged in April 1894.

One month later, he embarked on one of the most hideous sprees in the annals of serial murder. Armed with knives, scissors, and a cleaver, he took up the life of a tramp and roamed the countryside, searching for victims to butcher.

The list of his atrocities is as follows:

March 20, 1894. Vacher strangles a twenty-one-year-old woman, cuts her throat, stomps on her abdomen, rips flesh from her breasts, and rapes her corpse.

November 10, 1894. He murders and mutilates a thirteen-year-old girl.

May 18, 1895. He murders and mutilates a seventeen-year-old girl.

August 24, 1895. He strangles a fifty-eight-year-old widow and rapes the corpse.

August 28, 1895. He murders a sixteen-year-old girl, rips open her abdomen, and tears out the entrails.

August 31, 1895. He strangles, castrates, and anally sodomizes the corpse of a seventeen-year-old shepherd boy.

September 29, 1895. He murders and castrates a fifteen-year-old boy.

September 10, 1896. He murders a nineteen-year-old newlywed woman, then rapes the corpse.

October 1, 1896. He murders a fourteen-year-old shepherdess, tears out her vulva, and carries it away with him.

May 27, 1897. He murders a fourteen-year-old boy, anally sodomizes the body, then throws it down a well.

June 18, 1897. He murders a thirteen-year-old shepherd boy and sodomizes the corpse.

Joseph Vacher attacks a victim

In August, 1897, Vacher was finally arrested after attacking a young woman named Marie-Eugenie Plantier, who was collecting pinecones in the woods. Her screams brought her husband and sons running. Overpowered, Vacher was taken into custody and charged with offending public decency.

Before long, police realized that they had the notorious “Ripper” on their hands. After offering a written, sickeningly detailed confession to all eleven murders, he was brought to trial in 1898. He offered every conceivable excuse for his outrages, from temporary insanity to an uncontrollable impulse induced by a childhood case of rabies. The judge was unpersuaded. Convicted, Vacher was guillotined on December 31, 1898.

In the popular imagination, the stereotypical serial killer is a lone wolf: a solitary psycho who holes up in his lair, brooding on his sick, sadistic fantasies until, driven by an overwhelming compulsion, he emerges to go prowling for a victim. And in fact there are quite a few serial killers who fit this pattern.

But many do not. A surprising number of them—anywhere from 10 to 28 percent, according to the best estimates—go hunting in pairs.

Lake and Ng

Team killers, as they are now generally called, have perpetrated some of the most heinous crimes of modern times. In the early 1980s, a self-styled survivalist named Leonard Lake—whose keenest desire was to abduct women and keep them as sex slaves—joined forces with a sadistically simpatico Asian named Charles Ng. Together—in a specially designed and equipped concrete bunker constructed on a piece of wooded property in the remote Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California—they lived out their depraved fantasies, raping, torturing, and killing a string of captives while videotaping the atrocities. Their unspeakable activities came to an end in June 1985, when a hardware store clerk spotted Ng stashing a stolen bench vise in the trunk of Lake’s car. By the time the cops arrived, Ng had fled. A check of Lake’s car revealed that it belonged to someone else. The police also found a silenced pistol in the trunk. Brought to the station house for questioning, Lake—realizing that the jig was up—plucked two hidden cyanide tablets from the lapel of his shirt and swallowed them. He went into a coma and died four days later.