The Serial Killer Files (11 page)

A subsequent search of Lake’s isolated premises turned up a blood-soaked bed fitted with restraints, blood-caked power tools, homemade pornographic videos showing the two men debasing their captives, handwritten diaries detailing these outrages, and—buried around the property—an appalling cache of human remains, including the bodies of seven men, three women, two babies. There were also forty-five pounds of human bone fragments, suggesting that up to twenty-five people had met death at the hands of the psychopathic pair.

An arrest warrant for twelve murders was issued for Ng. He was ultimately arrested in Canada for shooting a security guard during a store theft. After years of legal wrangling, he was finally extradited and brought back to the US, though he managed to delay his trial until October 1998—thirteen long years after his capture. After an eight-month trial, he was found guilty of the murder of six men, three women, and two baby boys. He was sentenced to death.

God meant women for cooking, cleaning house, and sex. When they are not in use, they should be locked up.

—Leonard Lake

Bittaker and Norris

California was also the hunting ground for Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, a pair of quintessential psychopaths who bonded in prison, where they dreamed up a monstrous plan to kidnap, torture, and kill teenage girls while recording the crimes on tape. No sooner were they released than Bittaker purchased a used GMC cargo van that they christened “Murder Mack.” After a few dry runs in which they scouted locations, they put their hideous scheme into action on June 24, 1979, snatching a sixteen-year-old girl who was on her way home from church. They drove her to an abandoned mountain road, then raped her before garroting her with a wire coat hanger. Over the next few months, they abducted and murdered five more girls, ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen. The victims were raped, mutilated, bludgeoned, tortured with ice picks driven into their ears, slashed, and strangled. Meanwhile, their agonized cries and

terrified pleas were recorded on tape, while Norris chanted: “Keep it up, girl! Keep it up! Scream till I say stop!”

They were finally captured after Norris boasted of his crimes to a friend, who notified the police. Cutting a deal with the authorities, Norris testified against Bittaker, who was ultimately found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Norris received a sentence of forty-five years to life and will be eligible for parole in 2010. Bittaker has passed his time on death row filing nuisance suits against the state prison system (including one that claimed that he had been made to suffer cruel and unusual punishment from being served a broken cookie on his lunch tray) and enjoying daily bridge games with other condemned serial killers.

Corll and Henley

A particularly horrific case of team killing came to light on August 8, 1973. Early that morning, police in the Houston suburb of Pasadena received an urgent phone call from seventeen-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley, summoning them to the apartment of an older man named Dean Corll. When the cops arrived, they found Corll’s naked body on a bedroom floor with six bullets in him. It was clear at a glance that bizarre things had been going on in the room. Plastic sheeting covered the carpet, as though to protect it from blood. Sinister-seeming items—a bayonet, an enormous dildo, a roll of duct tape, a jar of Vaseline, and a bunch of thin glass pipettes—lay scattered on the floor. Most alarming of all was the large wooden torture board equipped with restraints.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Henley—who was there with two other teenagers, a boy named Tim Kerley and a girl named Rhonda—poured out his lurid story. Corll—whose job at his family’s confectionery business had earned him the nickname the “Candyman”—was a thirty-four-year-old gay who liked to party with much younger males. Henley was a friend of his. The previous night, Wayne had invited Tim and Rhonda to Corll’s house for a glue-sniffing party. Eventually, all three teenagers passed out. When Wayne awoke, he found himself bound to the torture board. Corll—infuriated that Wayne had brought along a girl—was

brandishing a gun and threatening to kill him. Frantically, the boy pleaded for his life, promising that he would rape Rhonda while Corll “took care” of Tim. When Corll finally relented and loosened Henley’s bonds, the latter managed to get his hands on the gun and kill the older man.

But there was more and worse to come. Henley confessed that, for several years, Corll had paid him and another young man, David Brooks, to procure young male victims. The boys—most in their teens, though one as young as nine—had been invited to Corll’s home for drug and booze parties. There, they had been overpowered by the much older, powerfully built “Candyman,” bound to his board, and subjected to hideous tortures. Some had been castrated, some had the catheter-sized pipettes shoved into their urethras and crushed, at least one had his penis chewed off. Eventually, they had been murdered and their bodies disposed of in various locations, including a boat shed several miles south of Houston.

At first Henley maintained that he had merely supplied Corll with victims—some of them, appallingly enough, his own friends and neighbors. Eventually, he admitted that he had been an active participant in the orgiastic torture-slayings.

Twenty-seven moldering bodies were eventually recovered, seventeen interred in the boat shed.

Convicted of one count of murder, David Brooks was sentenced to life. Henley, convicted of murder in the deaths of six boys, received six consecutive ninety-nine-year sentences.

The Lives and Lies of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole

Separately and together, the lives of Henry Lee Lucas and his sometime partner-in-atrocity are so unspeakably depraved that they seem like the most lurid, over-the-top horror fiction. And, in fact, it has become difficult to tell exactly how much of the story is true and how much is pure, malevolent make-believe. Long regarded as America’s most prolific serial killer with a victim count numbering in the hundreds, Lucas eventually recanted his confessions, claiming that he was innocent of virtually every murder he had admitted to. He became the sole condemned prisoner in Texas whose death sentence was commuted by then-governor George W. Bush. Still, there’s no doubt that Lucas and Toole were an unusually loathsome pair of reprobates, responsible for any number of heinous crimes.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

By all accounts, Lucas’s childhood was sheer Southern Gothic nightmare. Born in August 1936, he grew up dirt-poor in a two-room log cabin in the backwoods of Virginia with eight siblings, a moonshiner father who lost both legs after falling down drunk in front of an oncoming freight train, and a viciously depraved prostitute mother named Viola who entertained her tricks at home. According to Henry, Viola forced him to watch when she had sex with her customers, made him dress in girl’s clothes when he went off to school, killed his favorite pets as a form of punishment, and once beat him so severely on the head with a chunk of wood that he went into a twenty-four-hour coma.

By the time he was thirteen, Henry had been inducted into the joys of animal torture and bestiality by one of his mother’s johns. He took particular pleasure in trapping various creatures, slitting their throats, then having sex with the dead bodies. His first alleged human victim, killed in 1951, was a seventeen-year-old girl. When she fought off his attempted rape, he strangled her and buried her corpse in the woods.

In 1954, the eighteen-year-old Lucas received a six-year prison term for burglary. He was released in September 1959. Six months later, during a drunken argument with his mother, he stabbed her in the neck. She died forty-eight hours later. Receiving a term of twenty to forty years for second-degree murder, he was soon transferred to a state hospital for the criminally insane and paroled after only ten years. Eighteen months later, he was back in prison for molesting two teenage girls. He was released in August 1975, and began to drift around the country, reputedly killing victims as the spirit moved him. In late 1976, he crossed paths with Ottis Toole.

A snaggle-toothed degenerate with Neanderthal features and a subnormal IQ, Toole had a childhood reportedly as nightmarish as Lucas’s. According to the standard accounts, he was abandoned by his drunkard father, subjected to the religious ravings of his fanatical mother, and sexually abused by a sister. His grandmother, an alleged Satanist who concocted charms from human body parts, supposedly forced him to accompany her on her periodic forays to local graveyards, where she dug up her ingredients. By the time he was six, Toole was a confirmed arsonist, torching neighborhood houses because, as he later explained, “I just hated to see them standing there.”

The cretinous, bisexual Toole allegedly committed his first murder in 1961, when he was fourteen.

While hitchhiking, he was picked up by a traveling salesman who drove him to a remote spot for sex.

Afterward, according to his account, Toole jumped behind the steering wheel and deliberately ran over the older man with his own car. By 1974, he had hit the open road in an old pickup truck, drifting from place to place.

By the time he met Lucas in a Jacksonville, Florida, soup kitchen in 1976, there is some evidence that Toole was already a serial killer who had murdered four victims in a six-month span. Recognizing each other as depraved soul mates, Lucas and Toole hooked up for the next six and a half years. The exact nature and number of the enormities they may or may not have perpetrated during his period remains murky. Presumably, they spent a considerable amount of their spare time, raping, killing, and mutilating countless victims, as well as indulging in acts of necrophilia and cannibalism. Also during this period Lucas became smitten with Toole’s underage niece, Becky Powell—who would ultimately become yet another slain and dismembered victim.

Lucas was picked up on a weapons charge in June 1983. A few days later, apparently stricken with an uncharacteristic attack of remorse, he summoned his jailer and began to spew out a staggering confession. He had stabbed an eighty-two-year-old woman named Kate Rich, had sex with her corpse, then lugged it home, cut it to pieces, and burned it in a woodstove. And she was just one of dozens—no, scores—of his victims. Over the next eighteen months—as investigators from various states tried to clear up unsolved murder cases—the tally kept growing. Lucas claimed that he had killed women in twenty-seven states with nylon rope, a phone cord, guns of every caliber, knives, vases, a hammer, a roofer’s ax, a two-by-four. Traveling under heavy guard—dining on decent food and staying in pleasant motels—he led detectives to supposed crime scenes all over the country. By the time he finished, he had admitted to six hundred murders.

In the meantime, Ottis Toole had been convicted on an arson charge and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Implicated by Lucas, Toole added his own litany of confessions, claiming, among other things, that he and Henry had been involved with a Satanic cult called “The Hand of Death” that sacrificed children and practiced ritual cannibalism. He also claimed to be the unknown deviant who had snatched, murdered, and decapitated Adam Walsh, son of the future host of America’s Most Wanted— an admission he later retracted. There are many, however, including John Walsh, who remain convinced that Toole was in fact the perpetrator of that unspeakable deed.

Henry, too, ultimately recanted, proclaiming that his countless confessions were a hoax. He had never killed anyone, he insisted, apart from his mother. He had simply been toying with the police, making them look like fools while they shepherded him around the country, treating him to steak dinners and milk shakes.

Eventually, Lucas was convicted of eleven counts of murder. He received the death sentence, however, for only one of them—the killing of an unidentified female hitchhiker nicknamed “Orange Socks” (after the sole item of clothing she was wearing when her corpse was discovered in a culvert off a Texas freeway in 1979). Ironically, compelling evidence surfaced after Henry’s trial indicating that he couldn’t possibly have committed the “Orange Socks” murder. (Among other things, work records showed that he was in Florida on the day she was killed.) Lucas, it seemed, was going to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit. Given the number of homicides he was responsible for (anywhere from three to fifteen, according to the best estimates), most people couldn’t work up much sympathy for his plight. Four days before he was to die by lethal injection, however, Governor Bush commuted his sentence. Lucas—who had grown obese on prison fare—died of a heart attack in March 2001. Toole had predeceased him by five years, dying in prison in September 1996 of liver failure, evidently accelerated by AIDS.

FOLIE À DEUX

Coined in 1877 by two French psychologists named Lasèque and Fabret, the term folie à deux has been translated in various ways: “insanity in pairs,” “double insanity,” “reciprocal insanity,” “collective insanity.” In its original meaning, it refers to a rare psychological phenomenon in which two or more closely associated people—often, though not always, family members—share the same psychotic delusion. In a well-known case reported in the 1930s, for example, two middle-aged sisters became convinced that they were being blackmailed by a popular radio personality who was sending coded threats to them in the songs he performed on the air.

Nowadays, the term is most often used to describe something slightly different—not a shared paranoid fantasy but a pernicious bond between two people who bring out the worst in each other, egging each other on to engage in criminal acts that neither person, individually, would have the courage to commit on his own. In most such cases of folie à deux, there is one dominant personality who takes the lead in instigating and planning the crimes and one subordinate member who serves as an eager accomplice. In this sense, the term might best be translated—as psychologist Horace B. English half-humorously suggests—as “gruesome twosome.” There have also been rare cases involving mutually toxic trios or even foursomes (what might be called folie à trois or folie à quatre ).