The Serial Killer Files (62 page)

The situation is different with serial killers, who are driven—not by a slow-burning rage that erupts one day in a single, cataclysmic act of gun-crazed vengeance—but by a profound sadistic lust, a terrible joy in inflicting suffering and death on helpless victims. Because they derive such intense satisfaction from their enormities, serial killers generally try everything in their power to escape detection and capture. As a result, they present significant challenges to the police—so much so that, according to one expert on the subject, “nearly one in five escape completely and are never brought to justice for their crimes.”

Though it’s easy to overestimate the intelligence level of serial killers—particularly since they are typically portrayed in pop entertainment as criminal masterminds—most of them do possess a sinister cunning that allows them to get away with their outrages, often for considerable stretches of time. Some limit themselves to “low-priority” victims, knowing that such socially despised individuals can be preyed upon without attracting undue official notice. The small-town sex-killer who specializes in teenage male hustlers understands that if a few of these “undesirables” vanish from the streets, the police will shrug off the matter, assuming that the young men have simply taken off for the more congenial environment of San Francisco or New York City.

Other serial killers keep on the move, committing their atrocities in different jurisdictions so that the police do not even realize that the various murders are the work of one madman (a phenomenon known as “linkage blindness”). Still others strike in such sudden, random ways that investigators are unable to discover any clues that might point to a suspect.

There’s no question that investigative techniques have become infinitely more advanced than they were in the days of Jack the Ripper, when several crime scenes were immediately scrubbed clean of evidence (like a chalked anti-Semitic message possibly left by the killer) because authorities were afraid of offending the sensibilities of the public. Even so, there’s only so much that modern forensic procedures can accomplish.

While there have been exceptions—instances where masterful police work or brilliant psychological deduction or sophisticated scientific analysis has led to the capture of a serial killer—many cases are resolved as a result of other factors. The thirty-six serial killers interviewed by John Douglas and his collaborators for their landmark 1988 book, Sexual Homicide, had been apprehended for various reasons.

Police investigation had played a key role in half the cases, but other killers had been betrayed by accomplices or identified by spouses or had turned themselves in. And some serial killers end up being caught because—after getting away with a string of audacious murders—they start to feel invulnerable and grow increasingly careless.

A case that demonstrates the variety of factors involved in catching an elusive serial killer is that of Albert Fish. After a lifetime of preying on children, Fish committed his ultimate atrocity in 1928, when he abducted, strangled, butchered, and cannibalized twelve-year-old Grace Budd of Manhattan. Despite a massive manhunt—led by a fiercely determined New York City police detective named William King

—the diabolical old man managed to escape scot-free.

Six years later, however, his sadistic compulsions led him to send Grace’s mother an appalling letter in which he detailed the horrors he had perpetrated on the little girl. He wrote this obscenity on the stationery of an organization called the New York Private Chaffeur’s Benevolent Association. Fish had found several sheets of this letterhead, along with some envelopes, on a shelf in his boardinghouse room when he noticed a cockroach crawling on the wall and rose to kill it.

As soon as the Budd family received this deranged communication, they turned it over to Detective King. Because Fish did such a sloppy job of crossing out the embossed return address on the envelope, King was ultimately able to track Fish down to the boardinghouse and bring the sick old man to long-deferred justice.

Albert Fish might well have gotten away with one of the most shocking murders in New York City history had it not been for a combination of three things: the unwavering resolve of a New York City police detective who never gave up his search to find the monster; Fish’s own twisted need to send the awful letter and his inexplicable failure to obscure the return address; and the pure happenstance that led him to find the telltale stationery in the first place, something that would never have occurred if a passing cockroach hadn’t caught his eye.

The following ten representative examples illustrate how often the apprehension of a serial killer depends on a combination of factors, from police persistence to the killer’s own blundering behavior to sheer chance.

Bob Berdella

After spending several days in his Kansas City horror house raping and torturing a young male prostitute named Chris Bryson, sadistic sex-killer Bob Berdella left home to run some errands, leaving the still-living Bryson tied to the headboard. Seizing the opportunity, Bryson worked one hand free of his bonds, grabbed a matchbook that Berdella had carelessly left near the bed, burned the rope binding his other hand, then escaped through the window and ran to the nearest neighbor, who alerted the cops.

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris

This pair of vicious psychopaths was stopped when Norris couldn’t keep from bragging about his role in the 1978 murder spree to an old prison pal, who promptly transmitted the information to his lawyer who, in turn, reported the news to the Los Angeles police.

David Berkowitz

Son of Sam’s reign of terror came to an end when a woman out walking her dog on the night of his final murder recalled that, just before the shooting, she had noticed a policeman ticketing an illegally parked car. A check of tickets handed out in the neighborhood revealed that a summons had been left on the windshield of a Ford Galaxie sedan registered to Berkowitz.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

The infamous Moors Murderers were arrested after the megalomaniacal Brady decided that it would be a good idea to involve a new recruit in his sadistic undertakings and invited seventeen-year-old David Smith (Hindley’s brother-in-law) to participate in a horrendous ax murder. The next morning, the sickened Smith contacted the police who soon uncovered the appalling evidence of Brady and Hindley’s atrocities.

John Reginald Christie

After committing a series of grisly rape-murders, the so-called Monster of Rillington Place grew so incautious that he disposed of his final three victims in the most perfunctory way imaginable, sticking the corpses in a kitchen cupboard, then covering it over with a sheet of wallpaper before vacating the house. When the new tenants moved in and began to renovate the kitchen, they came in for a nasty surprise and the meek-looking psycho was soon under arrest.

John Wayne Gacy

The “Killer Clown” was caught after luring teenager Rob Piest to a grisly death with the offer of a job.

Before leaving for his “interview” with Gacy, Piest told his mother where he was going. When her son didn’t return, the frantic mother notified the police.

Randy Kraft

Guilty of at least sixteen murders, the so-called Scorecard Killer was arrested after driving around drunk with a strangled corpse on his passenger seat, forty-seven Polaroids of his victims beneath the floor mat, and a briefcase in the trunk containing a legal pad filled with notes about his various murders.

Dennis Nilsen

The end came for the “British Jeffrey Dahmer” when he began disposing of his victims by the ill-advised method of flushing their dismembered bodies down the toilet of his North London flat. When the building pipes became clogged, neighbors called a plumber who was understandably staggered to discover that the blockage was caused by a thick porridge of putrefying human flesh.

Joel Rifkin

After committing seventeen murders, the Long Island prostitute-slayer was caught when police officers spotted him driving a pickup truck with no rear license plate. When they pulled him over after a high-speed chase, they discovered the nude decomposing corpse of a woman in the back of his vehicle.

Jane Toppan

After a decade of serial poisoning, Nurse Toppan grew so reckless that she blithely wiped out an entire family of four adults in a matter of weeks: a father, mother, and two grown daughters, none of whom seemed in especially poor health before Jane showed up to care for them. Needless to say, their shockingly abrupt extinction set off alarms in relatives and friends, and Jane was soon in custody.

The fear of monsters is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Huddled in our beds as little children, we imagine terrifying creatures lurking in the closet, ready to spring out and devour us as soon as our parents turn out the lights. This primitive anxiety remains alive in the recesses of the adult mind and is stirred up whenever a serial killer is on the loose. We are all too prone to view these desperately sick individuals as larger-than-life demons—a perception reinforced by the tendency of the media to christen them with horror-movie nicknames: the “Night Stalker,” the “Vampire of Sacramento,” the “Sunday Morning Slasher.” The longer a serial killer remains at large—committing his atrocities, even with an entire police force on the hunt for him—the more supernatural he seems, a malevolent phantom haunting the shadows just outside our living room windows.

Because serial killers arouse such primal, irrational feelings in us, people have sometimes turned to the occult in the form of self-professed psychics in a desperate attempt to identify these psychos.

Ostensibly possessed of extrasensory perception that allows them to visualize the location of missing victims and sense the identity of the killer, so-called psychic detectives have an extremely spotty record when it comes to solving crimes, though occasionally (whether through sheer luck or the kind of gut instinct that all good detectives rely on) they have produced startling results. A representative instance of psychic detective work applied to the pursuit of a serial murderer occurred during the frustrating hunt for the Michigan sex-killer John Norman Collins.

Over a two-year period, beginning in August 1967, seven young women—a number of them students at either Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti or the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor—were murdered in especially brutal ways. Like many serial sex-killers, the perpetrator had particular tastes in victims. Ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three, they were all petite, long-haired brunettes with pierced ears. That his crimes were fueled by extreme sadistic rage was clear from the inordinately savage injuries he inflicted. All the victims were subjected to frenzied “overkill”: raped, tortured, slashed, mutilated, garroted, and bludgeoned. In several cases, their faces had been pulped with a hammer. One thirteen-year-old girl had a three-inch nail driven into her skull.

Despite intensive efforts by local police agencies, the investigation went nowhere. The late 1960s, of course, were the era of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby— a time when belief in the occult flourished in the United States. All manner of soothsayers, mind readers, and astrologers began coming out of the woodwork to offer solutions to the crime. In mid-1969, a group of local hippies calling themselves the

“Psychedelic Rangers” decided to take action by calling in the most famous, self-professed clairvoyant of the time, Peter Hurkos.

Hurkos had presumably acquired his powers in 1941 after falling off a ladder while painting a house and surviving a four-story plunge. He had come to the United States in 1956 under the sponsorship of a research society and gained national celebrity for his work on the Boston Strangler case, despite the fact that he ended up identifying the wrong suspect.

Arriving in Michigan, Hurkos—a master showman if nothing else—began a highly publicized quest for the killer that he presented as a titanic struggle between his own mysterious God-given powers and the Satanic genius of his adversary. He performed feats worthy of the most skilled “mentalist,” holding sealed envelopes containing crime scene photos to his brow, then reciting amazingly detailed reconstructions of the murders. To those inclined to believe in his powers, he achieved what seemed like miracles—though other, less starry-eyed observers were far more skeptical of his results. (At one point, he predicted that a body would be found “beside a short ladder.” When the remains of one victim turned up near a derelict barn with broken cellar steps, Hurkos’s supporters hailed this as a vindication of his extraordinary psychic abilities.)

In the end, despite a steady stream of announcements that he was on the brink of identifying the killer, Hurkos never managed to come up with a name, let alone a consistent description. At various times, he characterized the perpetrator as a self-taught genius, a depraved homosexual, a homicidal transvestite, a member of a Satanic hippie cult, a traveling salesman, and a scavenger who hung around garbage dumps. He was certain that the killer was a baby-faced blond of medium height who went to night school and possibly lived in a trailer.

Insisting that he would return the following week to wrap up the case, Hurkos flew back to his home in Los Angeles in late July. Within days of his departure, the killer was finally caught.

A handsome, dark-haired student preparing for a career as an elementary school teacher, John Norman Collins bore no resemblance to the suspect visualized by Hurkos. Typically described as the quintessential “all-American boy,” he had been an honors student and star athlete in high school. His affable, well-groomed exterior, however, was just a mask that sometimes slipped, revealing the true face beneath. With his good looks and easy charm he had no trouble attracting women. But a number of his girlfriends quickly realized that their handsome catch was a deeply troubled young man—moody, sullen, prone to violent tirades against women. And a few of his professors at EMU were surprised by some of the ideas expressed in John’s papers: that a man is bound by no laws but those of his own making. That he who is smart enough can get away with anything. That the Ten Commandments do not hold—particularly the fifth, “Thou shalt not kill.” Collins was apprehended when the manager of a wig shop was able to identify him as the person she had seen with the killer’s final victim on the day of the latter’s disappearance. Despite his protestations of innocence, he was eventually convicted of murder.