The Serial Killer Files (27 page)

Harvey Glatman’s victim Judy Dull, photographed in his apartment moments before she was killed (Corbis)

Even more ghastly were the anatomical trophies investigators turned up in the ramshackle farmhouse of the Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein, whose crimes—partly inspired by the lurid men’s magazines of the period and their obsession with Nazi atrocities—also reflected the dark side of 1950s culture.

In 1957—the same year that Glatman embarked on his murder spree and the Gein horrors were uncovered—another American serial killer appeared on the scene. That June, a woman named Margaret Harold and her army sergeant boyfriend were parked in a lover’s lane near Annapolis, Maryland, when a green Chrysler pulled up beside them. A tall, thin-faced man emerged from the Chrysler and, after identifying himself as the owner of the property, drew a gun, climbed into the backseat of the couple’s car, and demanded their money. When Margaret Harold refused, she was shot in the back of the skull.

Leaping from the car, her boyfriend ran to the nearest house and called for help. When the police arrived at the crime scene, they found Margaret’s body still in the car. Her clothes had been stripped from her body, and she had been raped after death.

Searching the area, police found a cinder-block shack, its walls plastered with pornographic pictures, morgue shots of murdered women, and—incongruously—the yearbook photo of a coed who had graduated from the University of Maryland in 1955.

A year and a half later, in January 1959, a family of four out for a drive near Apple Grove, Virginia, was run off the road by a man in a blue Chevrolet, who forced them into the trunk of his car at gunpoint.

Two months later, the body of the husband, Carroll Jackson, was found in a roadside ditch, lying atop the corpse of his infant daughter, Janet. Mr. Jackson had been bound and shot in the back of the head; the baby had been tossed alive into the ditch, where she had smothered under the weight of her dead father.

The other two members of the family—mother Mildred and her five-year-old daughter, Susan—were discovered in the woods by some young squirrel hunters a few weeks afterward. Both victims had been raped and beaten to death with a blunt instrument. Evidence suggested that the killer had tortured Mrs.

Jackson to force her to perform fellatio upon him.

The investigation into both cases had run into a dead end when police received an anonymous letter in May, pointing a finger at a young jazz musician named Melvin Rees, who—according to the tipster—had been making suspicious comments while hopped up on Benzedrine at the time of the Jackson killings. Checking into Rees’s background, detectives discovered that he had once dated the University of Maryland coed whose yearbook picture had been taped to the wall of the cinder-block structure near the first crime scene. It wasn’t until FBI agents searched Rees’s home, however, and found a saxophone case full of incriminating evidence—including handwritten notes describing his murder of the Jackson family—that officials knew they had their man.

Eventually, Rees—or the “Sex Beast,” as the newspapers dubbed him—was linked to the unsolved rape-murders of four adolescent girls in Maryland. He was condemned to death, but the sentence was later commuted, and he died of natural causes in prison.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

One of the most infamous multiple murderers of the 1950s was not, strictly speaking, a serial killer. A sociopathic punk who liked to think of himself as romantic young rebel à la his idol, James Dean, Charlie “Little Red” Starkweather was responsible for murdering ten people during a twenty-six-day period in early 1958. Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, however, fall into the category of “spree killers.” Their rampage through Nebraska and Wyoming was not a series of distinct events motivated by recurrent need for sadistic gratification but rather a single, if protracted, massacre.

Reg Christie, the Monster of Rillington Place

America wasn’t the only place to produce serial killers in the 1950s. In England, the decade began with one of the most notorious sex-murder cases of modern times.

The full story began to come to light in March 1953, when the new residents at 10 Rillington Place in London’s Notting Hill section began to remodel their kitchen. One section of the wallpapering seemed to have nothing but air behind it. Tearing away the wallpaper, they discovered that it had been concealing a cupboard. In the cupboard were three dead women wrapped in blankets. The police arrived to investigate and found that the three corpses were just the tip of the iceberg. Under the floorboards in the dining room they found another dead woman and outside buried in the garden they found two more.

The previous resident was a man named John Reginald Christie—Reg to his friends. A quiet, balding, bespectacled man, he had been in the public eye three years earlier during a notorious murder trial. A dim-witted young man named Timothy Evans had confessed to killing his wife and baby, then retracted his admission. He eventually claimed that the real killer was his downstairs neighbor, Christie. At the trial, the respectable-looking Christie testified to Evans’s guilt and the jury concurred. Evans was hanged. Now, after uncovering six more bodies, the police were beginning, a bit belatedly, to rethink the case. Christie himself filled in the details for them when they arrested him eleven days later.

Christie came from a working-class family and supported himself over the years with a series of menial and clerical jobs. But there were disturbing undercurrents coursing just beneath the surface of his seemingly unexceptional life. One was a chronic hypochondria that began in childhood and culminated when he was a young man in a case of hysterical muteness that went on for over three years. Christie also had an inability to resist other people’s property. He stole frequently from his various employers.

He and his wife Ethel moved into the flat on Rillington Place in 1938. Two years later, when he was forty-two, he began to murder women.

He pursued his secret homicidal life when his wife was away visiting relatives. He brought Ruth Fuerst to his apartment in 1940 and offered to help ease her respiratory condition by administering an herbal steam concoction. Instead, he gassed her, then strangled and raped her. He waited three years before he killed his second victim, Muriel Eddy—a friend of his wife. Both Fuerst and Eddy ended up in his garden.

In 1949, he got the wife of Timothy Evans alone under the pretext of offering another service. He claimed to be able to perform an abortion for her. He strangled and raped her and murdered her baby as well. The police found the bodies in the building’s toolshed. Christie may have somehow tricked the feebleminded Evans into confessing.

Once again he let three years go by without any further murders; then he set his sights closer to home, strangling his wife and stashing her beneath the floorboards. No more would he have to wait to have the house to himself. In less than three months, he killed three more women. They would be the ones he halfheartedly concealed in the kitchen cupboard before moving out at the end of March 1953.

After the police caught up with Christie, the tabloids dubbed the mild-mannered maniac the “Monster of Rillington Place.” The judicial system was no less appalled by his crimes than the public was. Christie went to the gallows just three and a half months after his arrest.

The 1960s

The serial killers of sixties America were as emblematic of that socially turbulent era as race riots, political assassinations, and the British Invasion. If we remember the decade as the time of JFK, Martin Luther King, the Beatles, and Woodstock, we also associate it with the sensational crimes of the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac killer, and—most notoriously—the demon-hippie, Charles Manson.

More than forty years after the Boston Strangler committed his first atrocity, the case remains one of the most controversial in the annals of modern crime. The first five of the Strangler’s eleven confirmed murders occurred during the summer of 1962. The initial victims were all older women, ranging in age from fifty-five to seventy-five. Each had willingly let her killer into her apartment, taken in by his story that he was a repairman sent by the landlord. Besides raping and strangling the women, he desecrated their corpses, sometimes by shoving bottles or other objects up their vaginas. In most cases, he left a grotesque “signature,” knotting his makeshift garrote (often a nylon stocking, though sometimes a bathrobe sash) into an ornamental bow beneath the dead woman’s chin.

Toward the end of 1962, his MO changed. He began targeting younger women, most in their twenties.

And his killings became even more vicious: in one instance, he stabbed a victim twenty-two times, savaging her throat and leaving eighteen wounds in a bull’s-eye pattern on her left breast. Another young woman was left propped up against the headboard of her bed, a pink bow tied around her neck, a broomstick jutting from her vagina, and a “Happy New Year’s” card resting at her feet.

With the women of Boston in a panic, a special task force was set up to track down the killer. With no solid leads, however, investigators were reduced to calling in psychics whose paranormal assistance—unsurprisingly—proved worthless. The big break in the case did not come until 1965 when a rape victim led the police to Albert DeSalvo.

DeSalvo had the kind of nightmarish childhood that is a prescription for future psychopathology. His father was the type of man who liked to bring whores home with him, have sex with them in front of the family, then beat his wife when she complained. One of DeSalvo’s most vivid childhood memories was of watching his father knock out all his mother’s teeth, then break her fingers one by one as she lay sprawled beneath the kitchen sink. The children were also subjected to savage abuse. On one typical occasion, Albert was clubbed with a lead pipe for not moving fast enough when his father asked for something.

Like other budding psychopaths, Albert displayed a sadistic streak from an early age. One of his favorite childhood pastimes was sticking a dog inside an orange crate with a starving cat so he could watch the cat scratch out the dog’s eyes.

By the time he was a teenager, DeSalvo had accumulated a long rap sheet for breaking and entering.

Joining the army at seventeen, he was shipped to Europe, where he married a German girl and brought her back home to the States. In 1955, while stationed in Fort Dix, New Jersey, he was charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl. He escaped prosecution when her mother decided not to press charges.

Afflicted with a volcanic sex drive, DeSalvo routinely demanded sex a half dozen times a day from his long-suffering wife, accusing her of being “frigid” whenever she rebuffed him. Back in Boston after his discharge from the army, he struggled to support his growing family with blue-collar jobs, supplementing his meager income with occasional petty burglaries.

He also began to assault women. His earliest technique was to go door to door, posing as a scout for a modeling agency. If a woman fell for this line and invited him in, he would pull out a tape measure and proceed to check out her vital statistics, a ploy that allowed him to indulge in crude sexual fondling.

Before long, the women of Boston were warned to beware of the smooth-talking pervert known as the

“Measuring Man.”

In March 1961, the thirty-year-old DeSalvo was caught while attempting to burglarize a house. Under arrest, he confessed to being the “Measuring Man” and was given a two-year sentence. Back on the streets after just eleven months, he embarked on a new, more violent spree of sexual assault. Posing as a repairman in green work clothes, he managed to talk his way into the homes of countless women throughout New England. Over a two-year span, the “Green Man”—as he came to be dubbed—raped as many as three hundred victims in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

During this same period, eleven Boston women were strangled and defiled by a smooth-talking sex maniac posing as a workman.

In November 1964—ten months after the Strangler killed his last victim—a victim of the “Green Man”

rapes gave police a description that led them to DeSalvo. Confessing to those crimes, he was committed for psychiatric observation to Bridgewater State Hospital, where he befriended a hardened killer named George Nassar, whose attorney was a young hotshot named F. Lee Bailey. Before very long, Bailey became DeSalvo’s lawyer, too. That’s when DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

In the end, DeSalvo was never punished for the Boston Strangler crimes. Under an unusual deal engineered by Bailey, he was spared the chair and given a life sentence for the “Green Man” rapes instead. In November 1973, at the age of forty-two, he was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate.

DeSalvo’s death, however, was not the end of the story. From the time of his confession, doubts about his guilt have been raised both by his own family members and relatives of his victims. Some believe that DeSalvo—knowing that he was already facing life imprisonment for the “Green Man” crimes—claimed to be the Strangler in order to cash in on the book and movie rights he assumed would be coming his way. Others believe that there was more than one Strangler. Support for the doubters came in 2001, when the remains of both DeSalvo and the Strangler’s final victim, Mary Sullivan, were exhumed and examined by forensic experts. DNA evidence taken from Mary Sullivan did not provide a match with DeSalvo. It seems unlikely that there will ever be definitive answers to the questions that still swirl around the case.

Another famous serial murder case also remains shrouded in mystery, though at least one writer claims to have come up with the long-sought solution.

During a nine-month span that began in late 1968, the citizens of San Francisco were terrorized by a night-prowling gunman who, in the years to follow, would assume near-mythic proportions in the popular mind. His notoriety stemmed from several sources: his seemingly preternatural ability to elude capture, the viciously taunting messages he sent to the press, and, perhaps most importantly, his chilling nickname, which has become almost as infamous as that of Jack of the Ripper—the Zodiac.