The Serial Killer Files (13 page)

In 1962, he married a troubled teen and part-time prostitute, Catherine “Rena” Costello, who was carrying another man’s baby. Shortly afterward, she gave birth to a girl, Charmaine. With Fred—who enjoyed impregnating his women almost as much as he liked watching them have sex with other men—she quickly conceived again. Their daughter, Anna Marie, was born in 1962.

For a while, Fred drove an ice-cream truck—a job that offered ample opportunity to prey on little girls.

Later, he found work in a slaughterhouse, an experience he would later put to appalling uses.

In 1967, fed up with her husband’s perverse sexual demands, Rena moved out. No sooner was she gone than Fred took up with a teenage mistress named Anna McFall and quickly got her pregnant. When she began to pressure him into marriage, Fred killed and dismembered her, keeping her fingers and toes as souvenirs—a grotesque ritualistic “signature” he would repeat on future occasions.

After briefly moving back in with Fred, Rena abandoned him for good, leaving him to raise their children, Anna Marie and Charmaine, whom Fred was routinely molesting. Finally, in 1969—when Fred was twenty-eight—he met the woman who would become his partner in the unspeakable for the remainder of his abhorrent life.

Rosemary Letts was sixteen at the time, the daughter of a schizophrenic father and depressive mother who had undergone shock treatments while pregnant with her. Rose grew up a sexually debauched, foul-mouthed loner who liked to climb into bed with her younger brother and fondle him.

Within a year of moving in with Fred, she gave birth to a daughter, Heather. Shortly afterward—apparently in a fit of pique—she killed Fred’s stepchild, Charmaine. Fred disposed of the girl’s body in his preferred manner, saving fingers and toes for his ghastly collection. Fred’s daughter by Rena, Anna Marie, was subjected to repeated sexual torture by her father and his new wife—Rose holding the eight-year-old down while Fred raped her. When Rena showed up looking for her children, she was murdered and disposed of the usual way: her body dismembered, fingers and toes removed.

For the next two decades, the Wests led an outwardly respectable life while pursuing a secret existence of unimaginable depravity. Rose worked out of their home as a prostitute, advertising herself in swinger magazines. Frequently pregnant, she gave birth to seven more children, some by Fred, others by clients.

Not content with their criminally kinky sex life (among countless other horrors, Fred liked to bring friends home and watch them have sex with his underage daughter, Anna Marie), the Wests turned to sadistic serial murder for the ultimate thrill. At least nine young women—ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-one—were lured to their home or snatched from the streets. Once in captivity, they were subjected to protracted sexual torture (sometimes lasting as long as a week) before being killed, dismembered, and buried in the cellar. When the cellar got too crowded, the Wests turned it into a nursery bedroom for their brood and began to plant new corpses in their rear garden.

The final victim to be interred in their backyard was their own seventeen-year-old daughter.

In August 1992, alerted by accusations of child abuse, the police showed up at the Wests’ home and arrested Fred and Rose for the rape of a minor. Taken into government care, the children revealed that their parents had kept them in line with a chilling threat. If they didn’t behave, they were told, they would end up “under the patio, like Heather.” Excavating the backyard, investigators quickly turned up human remains. They then turned their attention to the cellar, which yielded its ghastly trove. On New Year’s Day, 1995, having confessed to twelve murders, Fred West hanged himself in his jail cell with a bedsheet. Eight months later, Rose went on trial. She was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment on ten counts of murder.

Brady-Hindley

Thirty years before the Wests’ atrocities came to light, another British killer couple, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley—aka the “Moors Murderers”—earned everlasting infamy as the most heinous criminals of their day.

The illegitimate child of a Glasgow waitress who turned him over to another couple to be raised, Brady displayed classic psychopathic symptoms from early childhood. Though exceptionally bright, he did poorly in school, was subject to frequent violent tantrums, and indulged in extreme cruelty to animals—stoning dogs, decapitating rabbits, and, on one occasion, burying a cat alive. He got into trouble with the law from an early age and did prison time in his late teens.

In 1961, while working as a stock clerk, the twenty-one-year-old Brady met Myra Hindley, an eighteen-year-old peroxide blond typist desperate for relief from the crushing boredom of her life. Falling under Brady’s toxic spell, she submitted avidly to his pornographic fantasies, posing in Nazi/dominatrix regalia and lapping up Brady’s half-baked Sadean “philosophy.”

(Novelty trading cards courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Encouraged by his lover’s slavish devotion, Brady felt increasingly impelled to explore the outer limits of human depravity. Between November 1963 and December 1964, the monstrous couple abducted, raped, and murdered four children, then buried their remains on the moors. Generally, it was Hindley who lured the victims to their doom. Exactly how much she participated in the actual killings remains a matter of dispute, though Brady clearly took the more active role. Their final murder was, in many ways, the most appalling. After snatching ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey from a local fair, they brought her back to Hindley’s house, bound and stripped her, forced her to pose for pornographic pictures, then—before killing her—tape-recorded her heartrending pleas for mercy.

In October 1965, Brady picked up a gay seventeen-year-old named Edward Evans, brought him back to Hindley’s house, and split his skull open with an ax in full view of a witness, Myra’s brother-in-law, Dave Smith. Sickened by the crime, Smith reported it to the police. After arresting Brady and Hindley, police searched Myra’s home and came upon a claim check tucked into a prayer book. This led them to a locker in the local train station. Inside the locker, they found two suitcases containing a cache of incriminating evidence, including the tape recording of little Lesley Downey’s torture. When the tape was subsequently played at the trial of the monstrous couple, people throughout the courtroom—not only jury members and spectators but hardened police officers as well—openly wept. Only Brady and Hindley appeared unmoved.

In May 1966, both of the “Moors Murderers” were sentenced to life in prison. In the succeeding decades, the public’s loathing for the two remained undiminished. When a portrait of Hindley—painted in a kind of pointillist style from child-sized handprints—was exhibited at a 1998 art show in London, it sparked nationwide outrage. On November 15, 2002, Myra died of respiratory failure at the age of sixty.

Brady remains behind bars.

He is cruel and selfish, and I love him.

—Myra Hindley, writing about Ian Brady in her diary

Clark-Bundy

It is hard to know what early influences turned Douglas Clark into a monster. Though frequently uprooted in his younger years—his father, a navy lieutenant commander, was constantly moving the family from one international post to another—Clark enjoyed a privileged upbringing, living in the kind of colonial luxury that a handsome American salary can bring in places like the Marshall Islands and India. He was waited on by servants and attended elite private schools. It was the sort of life that has produced other intensely self-centered individuals who grow up with a keen sense of entitlement and a concern for nothing but their own pleasures. In Clark’s case, it produced something infinitely worse—a sexually predatory psychopath. His nasty adolescent pranks (secretly recording his girlfriends during sex, for example, then playing the tapes for his buddies’ amusement) were just a warm-up for some of the most unspeakable atrocities in the annals of American serial murder.

The forces that warped Carol Bundy are easier to discern. Though—in her typically deluded way—she would later recall her childhood in idealized terms as a warm and happy time, she was actually subjected to horrific abuse by both her parents. Her mother’s idea of discipline was to inflict savage beatings with a belt and tell the little girl that no one loved her or wanted her around the house. On the night his wife died, Carol’s alcoholic father announced to his two underage daughters—thirteen-year-old Carol and her eleven-year-old sister, Vicky—that it was now their responsibility to take their mother’s place in his bed.

For the next year, until he remarried, he took turns molesting both girls.

At seventeen, Carol married a fifty-six-year-old man to get away from her father (who hanged himself a few years later). When her new husband tried to force her into prostitution, she left him for another man, who promptly began to beat her. In 1979, she fled with her children to a home for battered women, then settled in an apartment in Van Nuys, California, where she quickly entered into an obsessive affair with the married building manager, John Murray. When he eventually brushed her off, Carol was shattered.

Three months later, she met Douglas Clark.

By then, Clark had a long history of sexually exploiting desperate women. In Carol Bundy—an overweight, severely myopic thirty-seven-year-old whose lifetime of abuse had robbed her of every shred of self-esteem and who was pathologically needy for anything resembling affection—he found a perfect match: a woman who might almost be described as his soul mate, though there is little in Douglas Clark’s subsequent actions to suggest that he possessed a human soul.

In thrall to her new lover, Carol quickly became his eager slave. When she wasn’t busy with her nursing job at the Valley Medical Center, she was helping him enact increasingly depraved sexual fantasies. She began by snapping pictures of him while he had sex with various pickups—one of them a child no older than eleven. Having his girlfriend photograph his pedophiliac encounters, however, wasn’t kinky enough for Clark, who had begun to indulge in elaborate daydreams of murder, mutilation, and necrophilia. In June 1980, he picked up a pair of teenage runaways, forced them to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint, then killed them both with bullets to the head. Afterward, he sodomized the corpses before dumping them down a highway embankment. Then he went home to share the story of his outrage with Carol.

It wasn’t long before the ever-submissive Carol was actively participating in Clark’s enormities.

Sometimes, she accompanied him when he went cruising the seedy Sunset Strip for young hookers. He would lure them into his car, then shoot them in the head while they went down on him. Other times—in an obscene travesty of the loving housewife fixing a nice brown-bag lunch for her hubby to take to work

—she would prepare a “kill bag” for Clark (containing knives, paper towels, liquid cleanser, plastic bags, and rubber gloves), then see him off on his nighttime prowl.

Her complicity in Clark’s atrocities reached a pitch of perversity when Clark brought home the decapitated head of twenty-year-old streetwalker Exxie Wilson. Throwing herself into the unspeakable spirit of her lover’s “games,” Bundy applied cosmetics to the head and gave it a pretty hairdo, after which Clark took it into the bathroom for some necrophiliac fellatio. “We had a lot of fun with her,”

Bundy later told police. “I made her up like Barbie.”

However devoted to her depraved lover, Bundy still carried a torch for John Murray. She occasionally met him for furtive sexual encounters, during one of which she revealed to him that her new lover, Doug Clark, was the “Sunset Slayer” whose crimes were all over the newspapers. A few days later—regretting her indiscretion—she arranged to meet Murray again, then stabbed him to death, cut off his head, and brought it home in a plastic bag for future disposal.

Shortly afterward, the unrelenting horror of her life became too much for Bundy. Breaking down at her workplace, she began to sob, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m supposed to save lives, not take them.” Before long, she and Clark were under arrest. Eventually, Bundy was sentenced to two consecutive terms of twenty-seven and twenty-five years to life. Clark received the death penalty and is still on death row, twenty years after his conviction.

The Birnies

Like other monstrous couples, Australians David and Catherine Birnie were two unspeakably codependent perverts who used rape, torture, and murder to spice up their sex life. As is typical in such cases, the man was the prime instigator, while his female partner was a slavish—if enthusiastic—accomplice, who threw herself into their joint atrocities as a way of pleasing her man.

A scrawny ne’er-do-well who grew up in various government institutions and was in trouble with the law throughout his adolescence, David Birnie met his future partner-in-crime when they were both children. In their late teens, they teamed up to commit a series of robberies that eventually landed both of them in jail. Catherine, released after a six-month stint, went to work as a live-in domestic servant.

She fell in love with her employer’s son and ended up marrying him. As their relationship deteriorated in succeeding years, however, she pined for David Birnie. In 1985, she abandoned her husband and five children, moved back in with Birnie, and took his last name without bothering with the formality of a marriage. Before long, their mutually toxic relationship led them to explore new extremes of depravity.

Like other killer couples, the Birnies were heavily into deviant sex. As their craving for ever-kinkier experiences accelerated, Birnie began to talk openly about his fantasies of abduction and rape. They first acted on these degenerate desires in October 1986, when they lured a twenty-two-year-old coed to their ramshackle house on the outskirts of Perth, bound and gagged her at knifepoint, and chained her to a bed. Birnie raped her repeatedly in front of Catherine. Then the depraved duo drove the victim to a wilderness area, where she was garroted with a nylon cord and buried in a shallow grave.

Three more nearly identical atrocities followed. The last of these crimes was so appalling that even Catherine was shaken by it. The victim—a twenty-one-year-old girl abducted from a bus stop—was taken into a forest, raped, stabbed repeatedly, then placed in a shallow grave. As Birnie began covering her up with dirt, she sat bolt upright. Grabbing an ax, Birnie smashed her on the skull. When this tremendous blow didn’t kill her, Birnie was forced to split her head in two.