The Serial Killer Files (22 page)

Exactly six months later, on May 1—Labor Day in Poland—a seventeen-year-old girl was raped and disemboweled in a suburb of Warsaw. In a hideous gesture reminiscent of Jack the Ripper’s atrocities, the killer left the victim’s entrails draped across her thighs.

By that point, a major manhunt was under way for the madman whose sinister, crimson-hued notes had earned him the nickname the “Red Spider.” Various clues led the police to deduce that the killer resided in the city of Katowice.

Their big break came on Christmas Eve, 1966, when the hideously mangled body of seventeen-year-old Janina Kozielska was found aboard a train. Before fleeing, the killer had slipped one of his trademark notes through the slot of the mail car: “I have done it again.”

Police quickly established that, two years earlier, Janina’s fourteen-year-old sister had met the same awful fate—a fact that suggested that the girls were acquainted with the killer. Before long, detectives had also discovered that both sisters were models at the Art Lover’s Club in Cracow—an intriguing lead, since police analysts had already determined that the red ink used by the killer was actually thinned-down artist’s paint.

Checking the roster of the club, investigators zeroed in on twenty-six-year-old Lucian Staniak, the only member who lived in Katowice. Their suspicions were strengthened when they broke into his locker and discovered a red-painted picture of a disemboweled woman with flowers sprouting from her gaping belly.

On January 31, 1967, detectives tracked down and arrested Staniak, though not before he killed his final victim, an eighteen-year-old art student raped and butchered at a train station. Though he confessed to twenty murders, he was ultimately convicted of six and committed to a lunatic asylum for life.

Li Wenxian

Information about serial murder in hard-line Communist societies is difficult to come by, since—according to official party propaganda—such heinous crime is strictly a product of decadent Western capitalism and could not possibly exist in a people’s republic. And indeed, the world might never have heard about the monster known as the “Guangzhou Ripper” if the hideously violated corpse of a young woman had not floated ashore in the then-British colony of Hong Kong in March 1992. The victim’s body had been slit from throat to groin and her fingers sliced off. When authorities determined that the body had drifted in from the mainland, the outside world learned the truth that the Red Chinese government had been at pains to conceal: a vicious lust-murderer was at large in their worker’s paradise.

The savaged corpse that washed up in Hong Kong that March was actually the Ripper’s seventh known victim. The first—a young woman missing her genitals—had turned up in the province of Guangzhou in February 1991. Over the next six months, five more young women met identically gruesome deaths—raped, murdered, mutilated, then dismembered, stuffed into burlap rice bags, and dumped on rubbish heaps.

Partly because of their reluctance to admit that a serial killer could possibly be at large in their country (the same willful blindness that hampered the hunt for the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo), the Chinese police were slow to resolve the case. Six more women came to grisly ends over the next four years. The break finally came in November 1996, when a woman survived the Ripper’s savage assault and identified her attacker as a construction worker named Li Wenxian, a onetime farmer who had migrated to Guangzhou in 1991, just prior to the start of the Ripper slayings. In custody, Wenxian confessed to all thirteen murders, exposing another discomfiting fact that clashed with the utopian mythology of the Communist state—that prostitution, as well as serial homicide, existed in China. A classic “harlot slayer,” Wenxian had vowed revenge against all prostitutes after one of them—so he claimed—had cheated him of money shortly after his arrival in Guangzhou. Convicted of murder and rape, he was sentenced to death in December 1996.

Who Is Killing the Women of Juarez?

Since August 1993, a killing spree of unprecedented proportions has drawn worldwide media attention to the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Though exact figures are hard to determine, sources most familiar with the case estimate that well over three hundred young women have been savagely murdered in the past decade.

The victims tend to be slender, dark-haired young women between the ages of fourteen and sixteen who have disappeared on their way to or from work at the foreign-owned sweatshop factories known as maquiladoras. Their bodies, often horribly mutilated, have turned up in the desert or alongside the roads leading to the squatter camps ringing the city. Though many have apparently died at the hands of pimps, drug dealers, jealous husbands, and brutal boyfriends, at least one-third of the victims—as many as ninety in the past decade—are believed to have been raped, maimed, and slaughtered by one or more serial killers.

The first “official” victim in the case was a young woman named Alva Chavira Farel, found beaten, raped, and strangled in January 1993. By mid-September 1995, more than forty brutalized corpses had turned up, some with their right breasts severed and their left nipples bitten off—the grisly “signature”

of the homicidal madman the press had dubbed the “Juarez Ripper” or el Depredator Psicópata.

A supposed solution to the case occurred in October 1995, with the arrest of an Egyptian-born chemist, Abdel Latif Sharif, a man with a long history of brutal assaults on women in the United States. After serving time on a rape charge in Florida, he relocated to Mexico, where he was taken into custody on suspicion of murder in October 1995 and allegedly confessed to five of the Juarez killings. At his trial in March 1999, he received a thirty-year sentence.

Following Sharif’s arrest, Mexican police triumphantly proclaimed that the case was closed.

Unfortunately, the corpses soon began piling up again—this time, at an even faster rate.

More suspects were arrested, including ten members of a gang called Los Rebeldes (“The Rebels”), accused of receiving a large sum of cash from Sharif to commit atrocities that would make it appear as if the “Juarez Ripper” were still at large, thereby exonerating Sharif. Despite the imprisonment of these latest perpetrators, however, there was no letup in the atrocities.

In the ensuing years, the grim pattern has continued: suspects are arrested, the police trumpet the solution of the case, then more butchered corpses turn up. Theories about the identity of the killer or killers abound. Candidates have ranged from a gang of homicidal bus drivers known as Los Choferes (“The Chauffeurs”) to the so-called Railway Killer, Angel Maturino Resendez, to Satanists, drug cartels, and members of the Juarez police force.

One persistent rumor, reported in the May 2, 2003, edition of the New York Daily News, is that “roving gangs kidnapped the women to harvest their organs and sell them on the black market to wealthy people needing transplants—possibly in the United States.” Most experts, however, scoff at this notion. A much likelier solution, as FBI Special Agent Art Werge has said, is that the culprits are not international organ traffickers or devil-worshiping cultists but garden-variety psychopaths, “acting out sexual fantasies that are violent that they simply get a kick out of.”

There’s a common belief that serial murder is a modern phenomenon which started, according to certain self-proclaimed experts, with the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Not to put too fine a point upon it, this is utter nonsense. The harsh fact is that we belong to a violent species; the kinds of outrages committed by serial killers have been an aspect of human society at all times in all places. As the Bible says, “There is no new thing under the sun”—and that applies to sadistic murder as much as to anything else.

Indeed, recent scientific evidence suggests that a taste for savage cruelty is encoded in our DNA, an evolutionary inheritance from our earliest primate ancestors. In his book Demonic Males, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham demonstrates that chimpanzees (who are “genetically closer to us than they are even to gorillas”) routinely commit acts of torture and mayhem as appalling as anything recorded in Psychopathia Sexualis. Not only do they prey upon vulnerable members of their own species, but their assaults “are marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood—reminiscent of acts that among humans are regarded as unspeakable crimes during peace time and atrocities during war.”

That human beings have always indulged in extraordinarily barbaric behavior is made clear in everything from ancient Greek myths (like the story of Atreus, who butchered his brother’s sons and baked them in a cannibal pie) to the recorded deeds of medieval knights, who—far from being the chivalrous paragons of popular stereotype—were brutish warriors who felt free to pillage, rape, and (when they got drunk enough on mead) indulge in mass slaughter, sometimes of helpless women.

Anyone who claims that there was no such thing as mutilation sex crime in centuries past clearly hasn’t read Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in which a young woman is gang-raped, then has her tongue cut out and hands chopped off to prevent her from identifying her assailants.

Given all the shocking evidence that lust-murder has always been a component of human behavior, how is it that people have come to believe that serial killers are unique to modern times?

There are several answers. First, a man who committed repeated acts of appalling mutilation-murder on innocent victims wasn’t necessarily regarded as a criminal in past ages. Throughout the millennia when bloody warfare was a routine feature of people’s lives, a psychopathic killer who enjoyed inflicting savage harm on others could join the army, butcher men, women, and children to his heart’s content—and earn a promotion for it. Francisco Goya’s famous series of engravings, Disasters of War— with its horrific images of rape, castration, and dismemberment—makes it appallingly clear that combat has always afforded an opportunity for uniformed sadists to gratify their bloodlust. This has been true even in recent times. One American soldier, for example, described a sight he witnessed in Vietnam. After shooting a peasant woman to death, one member of his squad “went over there, ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and cut from her vagina all the way up, just about to her breast and pulled her organs

out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then he stooped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other.”

Indeed, depending on who his victims were, a homicidal maniac wouldn’t necessarily have to bother becoming a soldier. Anyone could get away with serial murder, as long as he was preying on people who “didn’t matter.” If a peasant girl in twelfth-century Europe was attacked, raped, and murdered while walking through the forest, no one in authority would notice or care. Even today, certain serial killers deliberately target despised or disenfranchised members of the population—prostitutes, say, or poor ghetto children—knowing that authorities are far less likely to take such crimes seriously.

In our own country, just a little over a century ago, a psycho-killer could travel west and butcher all the Native Americans he wanted to with impunity. Anyone who doubts this sorry truth is referred to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a fact-based novel about a troop of white scalp-hunters who commit atrocities that would make Jack the Ripper blanch but who are rewarded for their actions because their victims are Indians. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove trilogy also contains vivid portraits of frontier psychopaths, like Mox Mox the “Manburner” and pretty-boy sniper, Joey Garza—fictional creations who reflect the violent realities of the lawless West. Back in those days, such remorseless killers were called “bad men” or “desperadoes,” but if they existed today they would be defined as serial killers.

One of the many atrocities portrayed in Goya’s Disasters of War (1863) Another reason why people assume that serial killers have only come into existence in modern times is that, back in the preindustrial days, there was no such thing as the press. There are no newspaper records of, say, fourteenth-century serial killers, not because human beings didn’t commit hideous sex crimes back then, but because there were no newspapers. It’s significant that Jack the Ripper’s crimes coincided with the rise of mass literacy and the appearance of the first cheap tabloid-type papers, like the Illustrated Police News of London. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial sex-killer, not by a long shot. But he was the first celebrity psycho made internationally famous by the media.

Besides the clergy, the aristocracy were the only literate members of the population back in the Middle Ages, and they were only interested in reading about their own kind. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the homicidal monsters whose names have come down to us from the distant past tend to be aristocrats themselves: Gilles de Rais, for example, or Vlad the Impaler. But again, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of degenerate killers among the “lower orders” as well. It just means that bloodthirsty peasants who preyed on their own class rarely made it into the official chronicles, which tended to stick to the doings of the high and mighty.

As David Lester points out in his book Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion, “Record keeping was highly unreliable in times past and crime detection was very rudimentary (the authorities would have had great difficulty in identifying a serial killer’s work), and so the true incidence of serial murder in premodern times is unknown.”

Recommended Reading

David Lester, Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion (1995) Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1996) GRIM FAIRY TALES

Because the literacy rate among the peasants of premodern Europe was basically zero, there are few written records of early serial killers. Evidence exists, however, that such monsters walked among them.