The Serial Killer Files (41 page)

Because Soviet dogma insisted that serial murder was a product of capitalist decadence—something that could never exist in a communist state—the gruesome murders were never reported in the press, leaving the unalerted public even more vulnerable to the depredations of the monster. On several occasions, Chikatilo fell under suspicion, but was let go each time for lack of solid evidence. In 1984, he was arrested on a theft charge but released after just three months in jail. Within weeks, he butchered eight more victims.

Despite a massive (if unpublicized) manhunt, it was not until 1990 that Chikatilo was finally nabbed. At his 1992 trial, he was kept inside a cage for his own protection. Jamming the courtroom, relatives of his victims howled for his blood, while—behind the steel bars—the Mad Beast ranted, raved, tore off his clothes, waved his penis at the crowd, and spewed obscenities at the judge. As the trial progressed, his behavior grew increasingly outrageous. At one point, he claimed that he was pregnant and lactating, and accused his guards of hitting him in the stomach to deliberately damage his baby.

If his wildly bizarre behavior was—as some people thought—a calculated attempt to prove he was insane, the tactic failed. On February 14, 1994—after his appeal for clemency was rejected by President Boris Yeltsin—he was led into a prison courtyard and executed with a bullet to the base of his skull.

The suffix “phile” is used to denote a person who is especially enamored of something. There are bibliophiles (book lovers), oenophiles (wine lovers), Anglophiles (lovers of English culture). And then there are necrophiles—lovers of the dead, people who get sexually aroused by the thought, sight, smell, and feel of corpses.

So revolting is this aberration that even Richard von Krafft-Ebing—who adopts a tone of scientific detachment in his classic text, Psychopathia Sexualis— can’t discuss it without using words like

“horrible,” “repugnant,” and “monstrous.” Still, there are degrees of evil even in regard to necrophiliacs.

Some are far more monstrous than others—with serial killers, unsurprisingly, representing the most appalling end of the spectrum.

Bizarre as it may sound, some necrophiliac acts have been motivated by overpowering love. According to his own journal entry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most revered figures in American literary history, was so devastated by the death of his young wife, Ellen, that, shortly after her burial, he went out to the cemetery one night and dug up her corpse. (What he did with it once he raised it from the grave is anybody’s guess.) This grief-stricken variety of necrophilia has even been commemorated in literature. In the famous ballad, “The Unquiet Grave,” for example, an anguished young man visits the burial place of his beloved in the hope of getting one last kiss from her “clay-cold lips.”

As awful as it may be to contemplate, this sort of necrophilia—in which a profoundly bereft individual, driven wild by sorrow, digs up his lover for a final embrace—is at least comprehensible. Significantly creepier was the case of Carl von Cosel, a middle-aged radiologist working at a sanitarium in Key West, Florida. In 1931, Cosel became so obsessed with a beautiful, twenty-two-year-old patient named Maria Elena de Hoyos that, when she died of tuberculosis, he smuggled her body back to his home. Despite being treated with formaldehyde, the dead woman’s corpse gradually decomposed. As it did, Cosel tried various desperate measures to preserve it, using piano wire to string the bones together, sticking glass eyes in the sockets, replacing the rotting skin with wax and silk. Most ghastly of all, he inserted a tube between her legs to serve as a makeshift “vagina,” so that he could continue having sex with the remains. This nightmarish travesty of true love went on for a full seven years before it came to light. But nothing could dim Cosel’s obsession. He died in 1952, clutching a doll wearing a death mask of his beloved.

However horrific, Cosel’s ghoulish activities were at least confined to a single corpse. Other notorious necrophiles have been far more promiscuous. Perhaps the most infamous case on record is that of a young French soldier, Sergeant François Bertrand, whose hideous career began in the late 1840s.

Possessed of an overwhelming compulsion to violate the dead, Bertrand would dig up freshly buried female bodies in Parisian cemeteries—sometimes with his bare hands. Then—“with a madman’s frenzy” (as he himself described it)—he would rape, dismember, disembowel, and occasionally chew on the corpses. Compared to the pleasure he derived from his “mad embrace” of the dead, he confessed,

“all the joy procured by possession of a living woman was as nothing.”

Another nineteenth-century French necrophile, twenty-six-year-old Henri Blot, was in the habit of dozing off contentedly after digging up and performing coitus on female cadavers in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen. On one of these occasions, Blot passed out so completely that, the next morning, cemetery workers found him sound asleep beside the ravished corpse of a young ballerina. Brought to trial, Blot earned a certain immortality in the annals of psychopathology when—after being rebuked by the judge for the “depravity of his offense”—he indignantly replied: “How would you have it? Every man to his own tastes. Mine is for corpses.”

And then there was Viktor Ardisson, a feebleminded gravedigger who reportedly had sex with over one hundred dead bodies. Ardisson was finally captured when police—who had received reports of a terrible stench emanating from his rooms—found the decaying corpse of a three-year-old girl that he had brought back from the cemetery and performed cunnilingus on every night for a week.

America’s best-known necrophile was the Midwestern ghoul Ed Gein. In the years following his mother’s death in 1947, this lonely, demented little bachelor made dozens of nocturnal forays into local cemeteries, where he dug up the bodies of middle-aged women and brought them back to the squalor of his decrepit farmhouse on the outskirts of Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Gein, however, differed from his European counterparts like Bertrand and Blot in several significant ways. For one thing, though there was clearly a sexual component to his acts (he performed gynecological examinations on the corpses and carefully removed and preserved the vulvas), he appears not have engaged in coitus. Instead, he used the bodies as raw material to make various macabre artifacts, from human-skin lampshades, to cranium soup bowls, to a “mammary vest” that he wore in his deranged efforts to turn himself into a woman.

Moreover, Gein was not just a grave robber and violator of the dead. He was a multiple murderer. When the supply of middle-aged female cadavers ran dry in the Plainfield cemetery, he resorted to murder, coolly dispatching two middle-aged women and carrying his booty home, where he butchered their carcasses like deer and put their body parts to various unimaginable uses.

This, of course, is what makes necrophiliac serial killers especially evil. Abhorrent as it may be to violate graves and sexually defile corpses, deviants like Sergeant Bertrand and Henri Blot limited their abominations to victims that were already dead. Serial killers who perform necrophilia, on the other hand, don’t dig up corpses: they create their own.

The best that can be said about Gein is that he was not a sadist. Uninterested in living women, he dispatched his victims swiftly, with a bullet to the back of the head, so that he could take their corpses home and play with them at leisure in the privacy of his hellish homestead. The same cannot be said about other serial killers who have practiced necrophilia, like Ted Bundy and Andrei Chikatilo. For lust-murderers like these, raping a corpse is part of their unspeakably vicious sadism, an expression of their need to dominate, humiliate, and annihilate other human beings.

I should like to wallow in corpses. I want to be stronger and stronger. I know that the dead bodies cannot defend themselves. I should like to torture people, even after they are dead.

—from the fantasies of a necrophile, as recorded by Dr. Wilhelm Stekel The abominations which serial killers have perpetrated on the dead are beyond the lurid. Edmund Kemper not only raped the corpses of his coed victims before dismembering them, but—on at least one occasion—had sex with a victim’s body after cutting off her head. Conversely, the “Sunset Slayer,”

Douglas Clark, used the decapitated head of a murdered prostitute for necrophiliac fellatio.

According to one of his apparently autobiographical short stories, Gerard Schaefer—aka the “Butcher of Blind Creek”—dug up the body of one female victim several days after burying it in a swamp and masturbated on the rotting remains. And Jeffrey Dahmer performed oral sex on corpses of his male victims (who would often die with an erection, a common physiological reaction to strangulation). He also took pleasure from cutting open their bellies and having sex with their viscera.

Dennis Nilsen, Lover of the Dead

Along with Jeffrey Dahmer—the killer he most closely resembles in terms of aberrant behavior and ghastly MO—Dennis Nilsen is the most infamous necrophile of the late twentieth century.

Exactly where his grotesque psychopathology sprang from is difficult to say. Certainly he showed none of the classic warning signs associated with budding serial killers—childhood sadism, for example. On the contrary, as a young boy he recoiled from cruelty to animals. Some experts who have studied his case attribute his lifelong fascination with cadavers to the sudden, shocking death of his beloved grandfather—the sight of whose laid-out corpse left a profound mark on young Nilsen’s psyche. Equally important in terms of his emotional development was the terrible isolation, the crushing sense of loneliness, that he experienced as a child and suffered throughout his life. And then there were his own powerfully conflicted feelings about his homosexuality.

Whatever the sources of his unspeakable perversions, they manifested themselves at an early age. In his teens, he liked to stretch out before a mirror and masturbate while pretending that the body reflected in the glass was a corpse.

In 1961, the sixteen-year-old Nilsen enlisted in the army. He became a cook and learned how to butcher meat—a skill later put to horrific use. It was during this period that he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old private, who indulged his friend’s peculiarities by stripping naked and pretending he was dead while Nilsen shot home movies of him. Leaving the army after eleven years, he tried his hand at police work.

Though he enjoyed his occasional trips to the morgue, the work wasn’t for him, and he soon took a civil service job for the Manpower Commission Services.

After the breakup of a two-year live-in relationship with another young man, Nilsen—cut off from all meaningful human contact—began to revert to his bizarre autoerotic rituals, applying cadaverous paint to his naked body, then masturbating in front of a mirror. By 1978, his simmering sickness—his utter inability to connect with another human being, his sadistic need for control, the grotesque attraction he felt for lifeless male flesh—reached a boiling point.

His first atrocity set the pattern for all the others to follow. In late December 1978, the thirty-three-year-old Nilsen picked up a teenage boy at a local pub and brought him home for a one-night stand. The next morning—unable to bear the thought of being alone for New Year’s Eve—Nilsen garroted the sleeping boy with a necktie, then finished him off by submerging his head in a bucket of water. After enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette, he stripped the body, bathed it, then laid it out in his bed. Over the next few days, he treated the stiffening corpse like a new lover, dressing it in fresh underwear, caressing it, masturbating over it. Eventually, he stashed it under the floorboards, though he would remove it from time to time for a bath and a bit of necrophiliac sex. He kept it around for seven months until he disposed of it in a backyard bonfire.

For Nilsen, it was the end of one kind of life and the beginning of another. “I had started down the avenue of death,” he would later say, “and possession of a new kind of flatmate.”

Over the next five years, he would find and acquire fourteen more such “flatmates”—young pickups he turned into corpses, then kept around for companionship, sleeping with them, bathing them, having sex with them. Sometimes, he would prop a corpse beside him on the sofa and watch TV in an unspeakable travesty of domestic coziness. At times, there were as many as a half dozen cadavers stashed in his apartment at once—some in the cupboard, some under the floorboards, a few in the garden shed. When it finally came time to dispose of them, he would call on his old butchering skills, dismembering the bodies with a kitchen knife, putting the viscera in a plastic bag, boiling the flesh off the skulls in a soup pot, stuffing the torsos in suitcases, then cremating the remains in his backyard.

The problem of disposal became trickier when he moved to an attic apartment in 1983. Without access to a secluded garden, Nilsen resorted to the ill-advised method of chopping up his victims and flushing the pieces down the toilet. His horrors were uncovered when the building pipes became clogged and the horrified plumber discovered that the problem was caused by a nauseating sludge composed of human bones and decomposing flesh.

Under arrest, Nilsen freely confessed to his atrocities. Indeed, he seemed eager to fathom his own motives, cooperating with writer Brian Masters on the 1985 book, Killing for Company. In the end, however, such evil remains beyond comprehension. Nilsen himself put his finger on the frighteningly fundamental motive that drives all psychopathic sex criminals when—asked what made him commit such horrors—he replied: “Well, enjoying it is as good a reason as any.”

To a certain kind of psycho, children are just targets of opportunity, no different from any other vulnerable people unlucky enough to cross his path. In 1920, for example, while residing in Luanda, Angola, Carl Panzram found himself relaxing in a park not far from the US consulate. As he sat there, an African boy, eleven or twelve years old, came wandering by.

“He was looking for something,” Panzram writes in his chilling jailhouse memoir. “He found it, too. I took him out to a gravel pit about 1⁄4 mile from the main camp of the Sinclair Oil Company at Luanda. I left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader. He is still there.”