The Serial Killer Files (69 page)

Ed Gein’s “death car” on display at a county fair

(© 2003 Journal Sentinel Inc, reproduced with permission)

Of course, there are many people who have no use for psychological rationales for such behavior, which they simply view as inexcusably wrong. One of these is Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victims Assistance Office in Houston, Texas. Acting on behalf of the families of those who have been preyed on by serial murders, Kahan has led a crusade against such material, which he has memorably labeled “murderbilia.” To date, his efforts have been instrumental in the adoption of a Texas “Son of Sam” law—which prevents criminals from profiting from the sale of their goods—and in the banning of serial killer memorabilia from the online auction site eBay.

On Sunday, July 28, 1895—following reports of the horrors that had presumably taken place in the Chicago “Murder Castle” of Dr. H. H. Holmes—five thousand people descended on the building, hoping for a glimpse of what the newspapers had described as its “torture dungeon,” “suffocation vault,” and

“corpse chambers.” Recognizing the money that could be made from such morbid fascination, an enterprising ex-policeman named A. M. Clark lost no time in securing the lease to the building. Two weeks later, newspapers announced that, under Clark’s management, the Castle would be turned into a tourist attraction—a “murder museum” with an admission charge of fifteen cents per person and guided tours conducted by a Chicago detective named Norton. Unfortunately for Clark, nothing came of his get-rich-quick scheme. Just days before the renovated “Castle of Horrors” was set to open for business, a mysterious fire broke out, completely gutting the building.

Something similar happened sixty years later when the ramshackle farmhouse in which Ed Gein had practiced his necrophiliac abominations was reduced to ashes by a blaze apparently set by outraged townspeople, determined to prevent the unhallowed place from being turned into a “museum for the morbid.” The obliteration of Gein’s dwelling, however, could not stop countless curiosity seekers from making the pilgrimage to his hometown over succeeding decades, much to the chagrin of the residents of Plainfield, sick of having their community forever associated in the public mind with America’s most notorious psycho.

The sites of notorious, highly publicized crimes have always exerted a mysterious, magnetic pull on the public. In 1908, the discovery of a dozen dismembered bodies on the Indiana farm of the “Lady Bluebeard” Belle Gunness, brought thousands of Midwesterners flocking to her property, where they could gape at the open graves and peer at the decaying corpses on display in the carriage house. Ninety years later, John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina—where, on the evening of October 25, 1994, Susan Smith rolled a car containing her two young sons down a boat ramp into the waters—became a tourist destination for sightseers from as far away as Alaska. In 1996, while visiting the site, one family became the victims of their morbid curiosity when—in a bizarre echo of the Smith crime—their truck accidentally rolled down the same ramp, drowning the mother, father, and three little children.

Not everyone, of course, thinks it’s fun to take a day-trip to a place where children were murdered or teenagers tortured or female corpses exhumed and dismembered. Some people find the whole idea abhorrent. Ed Gein’s house of horrors wasn’t the only such place to be razed by an outraged citizenry.

The suburban house in which John Wayne Gacy committed his abominations was leveled. So was Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment building, which a community group bought for the sole purpose of demolishing. In December 2002, Ted Bundy’s onetime residence went the way of Gein’s farmhouse and H. H. Holmes’s Castle, when unknown arsonists torched the Tallahassee, Florida, house in which he was living at the time he committed his final string of atrocities.

For those interested in macabre sightseeing, writer Neal S. Yonover has put together Crime Scene U.S.A.

(2000), a state-by-state traveler’s guide that provides descriptions of, directions to, and other pertinent information about infamous murder locations throughout the country.

For those who feel sheer disgust at the whole notion of “psycho-tourism” (as he calls it), the following excerpt is reprinted from writer Peter Schuller’s scathing satire on the phenomenon. (The entire essay can be found on Jeff Vogel’s Web site Ironycentral.com. )

“Psycho-tourism”

You’ve heard of Eco-tourism, where handfuls of broke-ass hippies go out to the boonies and “tread lightly on Mother Earth” as if this was some namby-pamby socialist state. Shit! More people would drive ten hours to see the face of the Virgin Mary weeping in an oil leak on some guy’s driveway than would paddle a kayak for ten minutes to see the last breeding pair of Woodcrested Chirrups in the wild.

Eco-Tourism, pshaw! Psycho-Tourism is where it’s at. People don’t want to see rare ferns or endangered predators. They want to see human predators! They want to see John Wayne Gacy’s crawlspace, where Pogo the Clown buried thirty victims. They want to see the soup kitchen where Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole struck up their highly successful necrophiliac-cannibal partnership. They want to sit in the V.

W. van that Ted Bundy drove. They want to open Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge. These are the kind of things that matter to people.

… Given America’s obsession with crime, Psycho-tourism is an All-American, capitalist venture that can’t miss. Property of killers is inexplicably cheap. The killer generates free publicity and a fan base to draw from. Tours can be arranged for next to nothing. All it would take are a few guides and some buses.

Let’s use Dean Corll as an example. We could buy his home, the factory and the boathouse for a few 100 grand. Tour buses would deliver pilgrims from surrounding Motel Sixes and Holiday Inns. They’d tour the candy factory and get to purchase authentic Corll Candy. Maybe they’ll offer some to kids in the playground next door.

Then it’s back on the bus and over to Dean’s. Here a Disney-esque diorama awaits. First, we walk through the living room where a Dean-robot gets the boy-robots high on glue and paint fumes. Then we move to the bedroom where the boys are handcuffed to the torture-bed. Be careful not to trip on the plastic floor-liner. In the next room, we see Dean’s bloody, bullet ridden body lying on the floor.

Turncoat Henley stands over him with a smoking gun. Dean’s penis collection lies on a nearby table.

After that, it’s off to the boathouse, where we’re met with another scene. A couple of backhoes are there.

The boathouse floor has been dug up, exposing replicas of the bodies. Henley is there too, leaning on the driver’s side of the police car, talking to his mother on the police radio.

“Mama, I’m with the police … Mama, I killed Dean.” The police recorded the actual conversation and it will be played on a tape loop for tourists as they pass by.

From there, they’re funneled into the gift shop where various Corll-themed knickknacks are available.

Items include: life preservers, handcuffs, glue, plastic tarpaulins and “I survived the Dean Corll Tour” T-shirts. Also for sale: toy boats with Skipper Dean and 1st Mate Henley, Dean’s Bag O’Penises and a variation of the kiddie board game, Candymanland.

Pockets emptied and shopping bags filled, the tourists exit the giftshop, board a barge and serenely float down river. This symbolizes Candyman’s victims drifting peacefully into the hereafter while taking our victims to the parking lot and their buses.

This is an example of what can be done with lesser known serial killers. Imagine what you could do with Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment or Leonard Lake and Charles Ng’s mountain hideaway. At the very least, Psycho-tourism should surpass military air shows, Civil War battle recreations and tours of Graceland or the White House.

—Peter Schuller

It’s a striking fact of life that—in fantasy at least—women seem to go for bad boys. The standard formula of female-oriented romance, whether in fiction or film, involves a respectable, well-brought-up woman who is married or engaged to or just going steady with a perfectly nice, if somewhat bland, fellow of her own social station and breeding. Suddenly, a seductively dangerous, often “lower-class,”

stranger (or former lover) appears in her life and sweeps her away on a forbidden passionate adventure.

The vast majority of women are content to confine this thrillingly erotic scenario to the realm of daydream. Some, however, feel the need to go further, pursuing a relationship with the baddest men of all—serial killers.

It is this female proclivity for flirting with danger that undoubtedly accounts for the otherwise inexplicable appeal that even the most repugnant psychopaths have been known to exert over women.

Men who, prior to their arrest, could never get a date—who sometimes turned to serial murder as a way of taking vengeance on all the women who rejected them—have suddenly found themselves the object of swooning attention from members of the opposite sex.

There’s nothing new about this phenomenon. For more than a century, observers have been struck by both the number of female spectators who flock to the trials of notorious murderers and the unabashedly heart-smitten behavior of some of these women. During the 1895 trial of the San Francisco sex-killer Theo Durrant, for example, a young woman named Rosalind Bowers showed up in the courtroom each morning with a bouquet of sweet pea flowers, which she presented to the “Demon of the Belfry” as a token of her admiration. Before long, the papers had made the “Sweet Pea Girl” herself into a minor celebrity, foreshadowing the kind of media attention bestowed on today’s serial killer groupies, whose strange infatuations are a favorite topic for supermarket tabloids and the sleazier TV talk shows.

Vile as he was, Durrant was at least a handsome (if profoundly psychopathic) young man. The same is true of other, more recent serial killers who have become homicidal heartthrobs—Ted Bundy, for example, and Paul Bernardo, the male half of Canada’s infamous “Ken and Barbie” psycho-couple. But good looks are by no means a prerequisite for romantic success in the bizarre realm of serial killer groupiedom. Creatures as repulsive-looking as John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas became the objects of female adoration once they were behind bars. Even Eddie Gein—a man who, prior to his arrest, had to dig up women from their graves in order to find companionship—was besieged by requests from gushing female admirers, begging for a lock of his hair.

Nor does the sheer atrocity of a killer’s behavior discourage certain women from pursuing them.

Edmund Kemper—whose sex life consisted of violating the corpses of butchered young women—had no trouble attracting girlfriends once he became infamous. Another psycho-killer with similarly abhorrent tastes, Douglas Clark—the “Sunset Strip Slayer” whose perversions included performing oral sex on the decapitated heads of his victims—became the love object of a woman who clearly viewed him as a soul mate, writing him a letter in which she wistfully asked: “I wonder why others don’t see the necrophiliac aspects of existence as we do?”

While some groupies are content to remain pen pals with their idols, others pursue the relationship much further, even to the point of matrimony. Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez was wed in prison, as were both Hillside Stranglers. One of the most bizarre instances occurred during the penalty phase of Ted Bundy’s 1980 trial for the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. When his girlfriend, Carol Ann Boone, took the witness stand to plead for his life, Bundy—who had been serving as his own defense attorney—rose to his feet as though to question her. Instead—much to the astonishment of everyone present—he proposed marriage, taking advantage of an obscure Florida law that allowed a public declaration in open court to constitute a legal wedding. When Boone accepted with a delighted giggle, she immediately became Mrs. Ted Bundy. She later gave birth to a daughter she claimed was Bundy’s, having become inseminated with sperm presumably smuggled from prison.

What lies behind the behavior of serial killer groupies? Perhaps these women are in the grip of a

“Beauty and the Beast” fantasy, believing that their love is so powerful that it can transform a ferocious monster into a decent human being. Or perhaps the opposite is the case—that they are so devoid of any sense of self-worth that, on some level, they believe that only a monster could love them. Perhaps they just enjoy playing with fire—getting close to a source of tremendous physical peril while knowing that they are protected by the steel bars and unbreachable walls. Who knows? As novelist D. H. Lawrence said, the human soul is a dark forest.

In a looser sense, the phrase “serial killer groupie” is sometimes applied to anyone, male or female, who develops an obsessive fixation on serial murderers. Two interesting books written by people who found themselves caught up in intense correspondences with infamous, jailed psycho-killers are Jennifer Furio’s The Serial Killer Letters (1998) and Jason Moss’s The Last Victim (1999).

As with every other imaginable subject, there’s plenty of information about serial murder on the Web, though it varies considerably in quality.

The single best site for biographies of individual figures—as well as for thoroughly researched articles on specific topics (like “Team Killers” and “Necrophilia”)—is Court TV’s Crime Library ( www.

crimelibrary.com ). Also very useful is the Serial Killer Hit List ( www.mayhem.net ). Though its gleefully ghoulish tone flirts with the tasteless, this constantly updated site contains solid, concise biographies of hundreds of serial killers (organized according to body count), including many obscure murderers largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Serial Killer Central ( www.angelfire.com/oh/yodaspage ) features brief, nicely illustrated biographies, along with a selection of serial killer artwork and poetry, and even an online store where dedicated gorehounds can purchase everything from coffee mugs to baseball caps decorated with the Serial Killer Central logo. The Crime Web ( www.crimeweb.com ) supplements its biographical entries with features like “This Day in Serial Killer History” and up-to-the minute “Serial Killer News.” Perhaps because it is a joint Australian-English venture, the Crime Web also pays particular attention to international serial killers, a nice change from the American-centric orientation of most of these Web sites. Good material can also be found on the Web site maintained by author Sondra London ( www.sondralondon.com ), whose relationships with sex-killers Gerard Schaefer and Danny the “Gainesville Ripper” Rolling have brought her a degree of personal notoriety.