The Serial Killer Files (63 page)

In the end—as is virtually always the case—it was not ESP but dogged police fieldwork that solved the mystery.

Though lacking a political motivation, mass murderers are akin to suicide bombers: men and women determined to go out with a literal bang and take as many people as possible with them. By contrast, suicide is relatively rare among serial killers. They derive such intense, twisted pleasure from their atrocities that they keep committing them until forced to stop.

There have been exceptions to this rule. Some serial killers seem to reach a point where they can no longer stand the unremitting horror their lives have become. They may begin to behave in such self-destructive ways that they are certain to get caught. Toward the end of his rampage, for example, playboy killer Christopher Wilder not only let one of his captives go free but drove her to the airport, bought her a plane ticket, and saw her off at the gate. And Jeffrey Dahmer seemed genuinely eager to put his nightmarish existence to an end. In contrast to other monsters like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy—who did everything in their power to delay their executions—Dahmer made no efforts to avoid death. On the contrary, he refused protective custody in prison, though he surely knew that—given his notoriety—he made a particularly tempting target for other inmates. When he was murdered by another prisoner in November 1994, the act seemed almost self-ordained.

It is now over. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself.

—Jeffrey Dahmer in his final statement to the court

For the most part, however, serial killers only commit suicide when—realizing that the jig is up—they choose a quick death at their own hands (or those of the police) over public disgrace and imprisonment.

When two Texas Rangers showed up to arrest him at his roadhouse, for example, Joe Ball—the homicidal tavern keeper who disposed of some of his victims by feeding them to his pet alligators—stepped behind the bar, rang up “No Sale” on his cash register, then pulled a gun from the drawer and shot himself in the head. When police began to dig up human remains on his Indiana estate, Herb Baumeister—the seemingly stable family man who led a secret existence as a gay sex-slayer—took off for Canada, where he ended his life with large-caliber bullet to the brain. Taken into custody on a shoplifting charge, Leonard Lake—who, along with his equally psychopathic partner Charles Ng, committed assorted horrors in his northern California torture bunker—downed a concealed cyanide pill.

The British sex maniac Fred West hanged himself in his jail cell before his trial. “Casanova Killer” Paul John Knowles committed “suicide by cop”: the day after his arrest, while flanked by a sheriff and an FBI agent who were escorting him to prison, Knowles made a mad grab for the sheriff’s gun and was swiftly shot dead by the FBI agent.

Of course, it’s likely that some serial killers have committed suicide before they were identified or caught. Experts theorize that certain notorious murder sprees have come to abrupt, inexplicable ends

precisely for this reason. Over the span of a year beginning in February 1964, for example, a still-unknown maniac killed a half dozen hookers and dumped their naked bodies around London, a feature of his crimes that earned him the tabloid moniker, “Jack the Stripper.” One of the prime suspects in the case—a security guard who worked near the site of the final murder—committed suicide in February 1965, leaving a note that said he could no longer “stand the strain.” Since his death coincided with the sudden cessation of the crimes, some people are convinced that the guard (whose identity has never been made public) was, indeed, the perpetrator.

It is even possible that Jack the Stripper’s legendary Victorian forebear—Jack the Ripper himself—took his own life. In the view of some experts, the inhuman ferocity with which the Ripper carried out his final act of butchery shows that he was in the throes of a complete mental disintegration, a spiraling madness that may well have culminated in suicide. This would account for the fact that the Whitechapel Horrors—the single most notorious killing spree in the annals of serial murder—stopped as suddenly as they began, and why the identity of their perpetrator may never be definitively established.

Some atrocities committed by serial killers are so unspeakable—torturing children while tape-recording their agonized pleas, slitting the mouths and slicing off the noses of still-living victims, castrating boys and forcing them to eat their own genitals—that just hearing about them is enough to convert the most committed pacificist into an ardent supporter of capital punishment. And a fair number of serial killers have, in fact, been executed. This was especially true in the past.

For all the denunciations of capital punishment as a barbaric relic of the past, modern methods of execution are positively humane compared to those of the premodern era. From an old woodcut pamphlet, for example, we know the fate of the sixteenth-century “lycanthrope,” Peter Stubbe. Bound to the spokes of a wheel, chunks of his body were ripped off with red-hot pincers, his limbs were pulverized with an iron rod, his head was cut off, and his torso was tied to a stake and incinerated.

The execution of H. H. Holmes

(Courtesy of Rick Geary)

In the nineteenth century, hanging was the preferred way of dealing with convicted sex-killers, at least in America. Thomas Piper—the so-called Boston Belfry Murderer—dangled for his atrocities, as did his West Coast counterpart, Theo the “Demon of the Belfry” Durrant (who was regarded as so loathsome by the citizens of San Francisco that no cemetery would accept him, and his parents were forced to transport his corpse to Los Angeles for cremation). The Chicago “Arch-Fiend,” Dr. H. H. Holmes, was also sent to the gallows, after which, by his own request, his body was interred under several tons of concrete to ensure that it would not be exhumed by grave robbers. Jesse Pomeroy, the “Boston Boy Fiend,” was initially condemned to be hanged, but—because of his extreme youth—the sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement, a form of living entombment that he endured for over forty years before being released into the general prison population.

In Europe, a number of the most notorious serial killers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were beheaded. Both Joseph Vacher, the “French Ripper,” and Henri Landru, the “Bluebeard of Paris,” were guillotined. So was the German lust-killer Peter Kürten, the so-called Monster of Düsseldorf, who announced that he would die a happy man if he could only have the pleasure of hearing the blood spurt from his neck stump. Kürten’s equally depraved contemporary, Fritz Haarmann, was beheaded by sword in the Hanover public square, after which his brain was removed and sent to Göttingen University for study.

All sorts of legends sprang up around the execution of Haarmann’s American admirer, Albert Fish, who, upon receiving the death sentence, reportedly declared: “What a thrill it will be to die in the electric chair! It will be the supreme thrill—the only one I haven’t tried!” Following his execution in January 1936, rumors circulated that the twenty-nine needles lodged in the bizarre old man’s groin had produced a burst of blue sparks when the switch was thrown and short-circuited the chair.

Nowadays, the death penalty is meted out much more sparingly. Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were put to long-deferred (and, in the view of many people, richly deserved) deaths. Both of them did everything possible to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Bundy in particular—like virtually all psychopaths, capable of feeling pity for no one but himself—was so weak-kneed at the end that he virtually had to be carried to the death chamber.

He lived too long, if you ask me. If they’d have asked me, I probably would have pulled the switch myself.

—Carol DaRonch, one of the lucky few who escaped Ted Bundy’s clutches By contrast, other serial killers have gone willingly to their deaths. When Harvey Murray Glatman

received the death sentence, his only comment was, “It’s better this way.” He refused to appeal and did everything possible to expedite his execution. Aileen Wuornos—whose disgust at the world was such that she could not wait to depart from it—similarly put an end to her appeals process after firing her lawyers. And Jeffrey Dahmer—who declared his eagerness to die at his trial—refused to accept protective custody in prison, fully aware that (as happened) he would most likely be killed by another inmate.

G. J. Schaefer was another monstrous sex-slayer who escaped the death penalty only to be murdered in prison. Others have been killed off by various ailments while serving out their terms. A combination of cirrhosis of the liver and AIDS took care of the odious Ottis Toole; his equally repellent partner, Henry Lee Lucas (one of the very few condemned prisoners whose death sentence was actually commuted by then–Texas governor George W. Bush) ended up expiring of heart disease.

Aileen Wuornos on death row

(Courtesy of Dan Spiegle)

Given the primordial human urge for vengeance, the fact that some psychopathic killers escape execution because of legislative bans on capital punishment can seem like a gross injustice, particularly to friends and family members of their victims. Such survivors often grow especially outraged when they see the butcher of their loved ones exploiting his notoriety (by selling his “artwork” to collectors, for example) or otherwise enjoying himself in prison.

A particularly egregious case was that of Richard Speck, perpetrator of one of the most heinous American crimes of the twentieth century—the rape and murder of eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966. Speck was originally condemned to death, but when the US Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, he was resentenced to consecutive life terms amounting to four hundred years. He ended up serving fewer than twenty, however, dying of a massive heart attack in 1991.

Five years later, a bizarre videotape—sent to a CBS News anchor in Chicago—set off of a tidal wave of revulsion when it was aired on national TV. Shot in Statesville Correctional Institute, it showed an unspeakably grotesque Speck sporting hormone-induced breasts, wearing blue panties, performing fellatio on a cellmate, and bragging about all the fun he was having in prison. Questioned by the off-screen cameraman about why he had slaughtered the eight young women, Speck merely shrugged, and said: “It just wasn’t their night.”

It was enough to make a person long for the age of Peter Stubbe, when criminals who indulged in acts of barbaric violence were punished with commensurate cruelty.

A Bluebeard Beheaded

In his 1936 book, I Found No Peace, foreign correspondent Webb Pierce—who was present at the execution of the French Bluebeard, Henri Landru in the early hours of February 25, 1922—vividly describes the scene:

Nearly 100 officials and newspaper men gathered in a circle around the guillotine; I stood 15 feet away.

News arrived from the prison that Landru, whose long black beard had been cut off previously, asked that he be shaved. “It will please the ladies,” he said. He wore a shirt from which the neck had been cut away, and cheap dark trousers—no shoes or socks.

Just as the first streaks of chilly dawn appeared, a large horse-drawn van arrived and backed up within a few feet of the guillotine. The executioner’s assistants pulled two wicker baskets from it; placed the small round one in front of the machine where the head would fall, and the large coffin-shaped one close behind the guillotine.

Suddenly the great wooden gates of the prison swing open. Three figures appeared walking rapidly. On each side a jailer held Landru by his arms, which were strapped behind him, supporting him and pulling him forward as fast as they could walk. His bare feet pattered on the cold cobblestones and his knees seemed not to be functioning. His face was waxen and as he caught sight of the ghastly machine, he went livid.

The jailers hastily pushed Landru face downward under the lunette, a half-moon-shaped wooden block which clamped his neck beneath the suspended knife. In a split second the knife flicked down, and the head fell with a thud in the basket. As an assistant lifted the hinged board and rolled the headless body into the big wicker basket, a hideous spurt of blood gushed out… .

Since Landru had first appeared in the prison courtyard, only 26 seconds had elapsed.

NGRI (NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY)

Common sense suggests that a person who rapes dead bodies or cannibalizes children or drills holes in his lovers’ skulls to turn them into sex-zombies qualifies as insane. Common sense and the law, however, don’t always coincide.

In the strict legal sense of the term—based on a 160-year-old precedent known as the M’Naghten Rule—insanity is defined as the inability to distinguish right from wrong. Since the majority of serial killers are psychopaths—beings who, however devoid of moral faculties, behave in rational, often highly calculating, ways—it is hard to argue that they meet the legal criterion for insanity. The mere fact that most serial killers go to such lengths to elude capture suggests that they know they’re engaged in wrongdoing.

As psychiatrist Donald Lunde puts it in his classic book Murder and Madness, the purpose of an insanity trial is to “separate the mad from the bad.” American juries, however, as Lunde also points out, are often reluctant “to believe that someone who kills is mad rather than bad. In fact, many people suspect that the insanity defense is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an acquittal of an obviously guilty client.” The case of Albert Fish is instructive. Possessor of one of the most extravagantly bizarre psychologies in the annals of crime, Fish was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury that—though acknowledging his extreme mental derangement—found his crimes so appalling that they could not bring themselves to acquit him.

Even judges can be hard to convince. Despite testimony from a team of psychiatrists that David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz was mentally “incapacitated” and therefore legally insane (a reasonable diagnosis of someone who believed he was taking orders from a demon-possessed dog), the presiding judge sided with the lone prosecution expert, who declared that “while the defendant shows paranoid traits, they do not interfere with his fitness to stand trial.”