The Serial Killer Files (2 page)

“serial killer”:

Someone, raising a question that trails Brown from forum to forum, asks about race and the murders.

Some Atlantans fear racial violence if a “serial” killer is discovered to be white.

Since the term “serial killer” was invented to describe a specific type of criminal, you’d think the definition would be clear-cut. However, confusion surrounds the term. Even the experts can’t agree.

Let’s start with the official FBI definition:

Three or more separate events in three or more separate locations with an emotional cooling-off period between homicides.

—FBI Crime Classification Manual (1992)

This definition stresses three elements:

1. Quantity. There have to be at least three murders.

2. Place. The murders have to occur at different locations.

3. Time. There has to be a “cooling-off period”—an interval between the murders that can last anywhere from several hours to several years.

The last two characteristics are meant to differentiate serial killing from mass murder, in which a suicidal, rage-filled individual slaughters a bunch of people at once: a disgruntled employee, for example, who shows up at his office with an automatic weapon and blows away a half dozen coworkers before turning the gun on himself.

There are several problems with the FBI definition. In one respect, it’s much too broad, since it can be applied to homicidal types who aren’t serial killers: professional hit men, for example, or Western outlaws like William “Billy the Kid” Bonney, who is said to have gunned down twenty-one men before he reached the age of twenty-one. “Mad bombers” like Ted Kaczynski also meet the FBI’s criteria. But none of these types match the common conception of a serial killer.

In another respect, the FBI definition is overly narrow, since it specifies that a serial killer has to commit his crimes “in three or more separate locations.” To be sure, some serial killers range far and wide in their search for prey. Ted Bundy, for example, murdered women in several different states. Others, however, prefer to do their dirty work in one place. John Wayne Gacy, for example, turned the basement of his suburban split-level into a private torture chamber and even disposed of his victims’ remains at home, stashing them in the crawl space until he ran out of room.

The main defect in the FBI definition, however, is what’s missing from it—namely, any sense of the specific nature of the crimes. When Siegfried Kracauer first used the term “serial murderer,” he was discussing the character played by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s classic movie, M: a repulsive, moon-faced pervert who preys on little girls. A few years later, John Brophy used it to describe killers like Jack the Ripper and Earle Leonard Nelson, the infamous “Gorilla Murderer” of the 1920s who strangled and raped several dozen women across the United States and up into Canada. And when Robert Ressler and his colleagues in the Behavioral Science Unit adopted the term in the 1970s, they applied it to homicidal psychopaths like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Edmund Kemper. In all these cases, there was one common thread: a strong component of depraved sexuality.

Recognizing this fact, some experts stress the sexual motivations behind serial murder, defining it as the act of ultraviolent deviants, who get twisted pleasure from inflicting extreme harm on their victims and who will keep on committing their atrocities until they are stopped.

Of course, there are criminals who match this profile but who can’t be considered serial killers for one simple reason: they are caught after committing a single homicide. An example is James Lawson, described in the book The Evil That Men Do by Stephen Michaud and former FBI Special Agent Roy Hazelwood (another member of the FBI’s original Mind Hunter team).

A convicted rapist, Lawson was sent to a California state mental institution, where he struck up a friendship with a fellow inmate, James Odom. The two men began sharing their fantasies of rape and murder, encouraging each other’s sickest impulses and forming a bond based on their mutual depravity.

No sooner were they released than they decided to put their dreams into action. Abducting a twenty-five-year-old female convenience store clerk, they drove her to an isolated location. First Odom raped her in the backseat while Lawson watched.

Then Lawson went to work on her with his knife.

I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person, and destroy her so she would not exist. I began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her breasts off. After this, all I remember is that I kept cutting on her body.

—James Lawson

Fortunately, the two men were traced and arrested in short order. However, Lawson’s case raises an interesting question. There’s no doubt that he had the mentality of a serial killer; his confession makes that brutally clear. How many women would he have had to butcher before qualifying for that label?

“Three or more,” according to the FBI definition. But that number seems arbitrary. Let’s suppose that, over the span of several weeks, the police in a small California town had found the remains of two female victims, killed and mutilated in the same way. Wouldn’t they be justified in suspecting that a serial killer was on the loose?

These flaws in the FBI definition are rectified in another, more flexible one formulated by the National Institutes of Justice, which many authorities regard as a more accurate description: A series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years. Quite often the motive is psychological, and the offender’s behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones.

—National Institutes of Justice

CATEGORIES OF CARNAGE: SERIAL/MASS/SPREE

Though people sometimes confuse the terms and use them interchangeably, there are important differences between serial murder and the other major types of multiple homicide, mass murder and spree killing.

For the most part, serial murder is a sex crime, a fact that accounts for its distinctive features. The classic pattern of serial murder is a grotesque travesty of normal sexual functioning.

Most people who haven’t had sex for a while begin to crave it more and more. They daydream about it.

In vulgar terms, they grow increasingly horny. If unattached, they eventually seek out a willing partner.

Once they’ve gratified their sexual urges, the need subsides for a certain period of time.

In a parallel way, the serial killer spends his time fantasizing about dominance, torture, and murder. In effect, he grows horny for blood. When his twisted desires get too strong to resist, he goes prowling for unwitting prey. His excitement reaches a climax with the suffering and death of the victim. Afterward, he experiences a “cooling-off” period. (This is somewhat of a misnomer since it is during this lull between crimes that the killer’s bloodlust begins to build again. It would be more accurate to describe it as a “cooling-off/heating-up” period.) During this time, he may make use of “trophies” he has taken from a murder scene to relive the crime in his mind, savoring the memory of his victim’s suffering.

In short, their unspeakable acts are a source of supreme pleasure to serial killers, who achieve the highest pitch of arousal—even to the point of orgasm—by inflicting savage harm on other human beings. Because doing terrible things feels so good to them, serial killers try not to get caught, so they can keep on enjoying their atrocities for as long as possible.

Mass Murder

Apart from the fact that they both involve multiple homicides, mass murder and serial killing have almost nothing in common.

Whereas the serial killer is often described as a predator, the mass murderer is stereotypically defined as a “human time bomb.” Though there have been a number of female mass murderers, the great preponderance are male. In general, the mass murderer is someone whose life has come unraveled—who has been thrown out by his wife or fired from his job or suffered some other humiliating blow that pushes him over the edge. Filled with an annihilating rage at everything he blames for his failure, he explodes in a burst of devastating violence that wipes out everyone within range (a phenomenon that has entered slang as “going postal,” a sardonic tribute to the number of US Postal Service workers who seem to have perpetrated such acts).

If serial murder is, in essence, a sex crime, mass murder is almost always a suicidal one. In blind, apocalyptic fury, the mass murderer has decided to go out with a bang and take as many people with him as possible. Typically, once the bloodbath is over, the mass murderer will either end his own life or provoke a fatal shoot-out with the police (“suicide by cop,” as it is called).

Someday before I kill myself, I’ll bring some people down with me.

—Sylvia Seegrist, mass murderer

Since his intention is to blow away as many people as possible, the mass murderer almost always uses firearms. This is in marked contrast to most serial killers, who (with notable exceptions like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz and Zodiac) prefer the sadistic “hands-on” thrill of stabbing, strangling, mauling, and mutilating.

A key element of mass murder is that, by definition, it occurs in a single location. Indeed, it is this factor, as much as anything else, that amounts for the devastating nature of the crime. The mass murderer is someone who—like a suicide bomber—detonates without warning in a restaurant, a playground, a schoolroom, an office, or even (as in the 1999 case of Larry Gene Ashbrook) a church, turning a safe, familiar setting into the scene of a corpse-strewn massacre.

Though mass murderers don’t exert the same morbid fascination as serial killers—largely because their crimes are less sensationally gruesome and sexually perverted—they often run up substantial body counts. Charles Whitman, for example—the Texas Tower sniper who, on August 1, 1966, barricaded himself on the observation deck overlooking the University of Texas campus and began picking off people below—killed fourteen victims in the course of his massacre. And even this grim total was surpassed by the case of James Huberty, one of the worst mass-murder episodes of modern times.

James Huberty and the McDonald’s Massacre

The site was significant: a suburban McDonald’s restaurant. This all-American symbol of happy family life and material satisfaction represented everything that James Oliver Huberty had struggled so hard—and failed so miserably—to achieve.

His life had been difficult from the start. His mother, a religious zealot, became a missionary and abandoned her family when James was only seven. Raised by his father, he grew up lonely and resentful, a boy whose sole companion was his dog and whose only interest was guns.

His earliest ambition, to work in a funeral home, didn’t pan out. Though he received a license from the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science, he lacked the personal skills necessary for a successful mortician. “He was a good embalmer, but just didn’t relate to people,” was one professional assessment.

Still, he managed to prosper for a while. In 1965—at the age of twenty-three—he married his girlfriend, Etna. A few years later, they moved into a comfortable house in Massillon, Ohio. By the early seventies, Huberty was the father of two, with a good, steady job as a welder at a utility plant in nearby Canton.

His family was the center of his existence. Outside of Etna and the girls, he had no social contacts. He bickered constantly with his neighbors and spent much of his spare time reading gun magazines and survivalist literature. On the whole, however, Huberty’s life during this period was as stable and content as it would ever be.

The bottom fell out in the early 1980s, when hard times hit the area. The plant closed, Huberty lost his job, and—as Etna later put it—“his life came crashing in around him.” After nearly six months of unemployment, he landed another job, but was soon laid off again. He started to talk of suicide—and worse.

According to an acquaintance, it was around this time that Huberty began voicing scary thoughts. “He said he had nothing to live for, no job or anything. He said that if this was the end of his making his living for his family, he was going to take everyone with him.”

In late 1983, in a desperate hunt for a better life, the forty-one-year-old Huberty moved his family to San Ysidro, California, a suburb of San Diego just north of the Mexican border. He found work as a security guard, but the job didn’t last. His family was forced to move again and again, each time to a slightly shabbier apartment. Huberty grew increasingly paranoid, venting his bitterness at the world. On Wednesday, July 18, 1984, after a morning trip to Traffic Court to pay a ticket, Huberty reached the end of the line. “Society had its chance,” he said to his wife. In their bedroom a few hours later, he dressed in camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. His wife asked where he was going.

“Hunting humans,” he said.

Not long afterward, he showed up at the local McDonald’s with a semiautomatic rifle, a 9-mm pistol, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and a canvas bag full of ammo. Almost immediately, he opened fire. Seventy-five minutes later, twenty-one people were dead, many of them children, and another nineteen wounded.

The massacre didn’t stop until a SWAT team sniper fired a .308-caliber into James Huberty’s dark heart.

Spree Killing

With one key exception, spree and mass murder are more or less identical phenomena.

Like the mass murderer, the spree killer is someone who has become so profoundly alienated and embittered that he no longer feels connected to human society. His life has amounted to nothing, and his murderous rampage is his way of bringing his intolerable existence to an explosive end. Most spree killers prefer death to surrender; others allow themselves to be captured, knowing that they will be executed or locked away forever. One way or another, their lives are over.

Two major motives fuel the spree killer’s final, hate-filled act: revenge against the world and a desire to show that—all evidence to the contrary—he is a person to be reckoned with. Tormented by his failure to achieve those things that seem to come so easily to others—satisfying work, loving relationships—he will prove that he is special in at least one regard: in his power to wreak havoc.