The Serial Killer Files (8 page)

Jarvis Catoe

It is significant that one of the most notorious African-American serial killers of the mid–twentieth century, Jarvis Catoe, only got caught after he began to target white women. In March 1941, a twenty-five-year-old newlywed named Rose Abramowitz approached Catoe, who was loitering outside her Washington, DC apartment building. Abramowitz hired him to wax the linoleum floor of her kitchen.

Once inside her home, Catoe strangled and raped her, then made off with twenty dollars. A few months later, twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Strieff got into his car during a rainstorm, mistaking it for a taxi.

Driving her to a nearby garage, Catoe raped and strangled her, then dumped her nude body in another garage a short distance away. His final victim, also Caucasian, was a twenty-six-year-old Bronx waitress named Evelyn Anderson. A watch belonging to Anderson was recovered from a New York City pawnshop and traced back to Catoe. In custody, he confessed to having strangled ten women with his bare hands and raped at least four others during the preceding three years. The majority of his victims had been—as the newspapers put it—“Negro women,” a fact that undoubtedly accounted for the initially lethargic response of the police in pursuing the culprit. Convicted of the Abramowitz murder, Catoe was sentenced to death and electrocuted on January 13, 1943.

Henry Louis Wallace

In restricting himself to victims of his own race, another African-American psychopath—Henry Louis Wallace—was more typical of serial killers in general, though he deviated from the usual pattern in another regard. Whereas most male serial killers prey on strangers, Wallace murdered a string of acquaintances. Between September 1992 and March 1994, the crack-addicted Wallace raped and strangled nine young black women in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, all people who knew and trusted him. Some were employees at the Taco Bell he managed. Several worked with his girlfriend.

One was his girlfriend’s roommate. Others knew his sister. As with many serial killers, the pace of Wallace’s crimes escalated over time. His first six murders occurred over a twenty-month span; his final three within seventy-two hours. Finally arrested in January 1994, he promptly confessed to all nine killings and was sentenced to death. Because they were slow to acknowledge a link among Wallace’s earliest murders, the Charlotte police were accused of racism: of failing to take the case seriously because the victims were black.

Carlton Gary

Carlton Gary, another notorious black serial killer, had particular tastes when it came to victims. He only killed outside his race, limiting himself to female Caucasians. He also liked his women old.

Abandoned by his father and shuttled from pillar to post throughout his hardscrabble childhood, Gary accumulated a long rap sheet for robbery, arson, and drug dealing while still in his teens. His combination of exceptional intelligence, glib charm, and psychopathic cunning made him especially dangerous. At one point in his life, he was even dating a female deputy sheriff while pushing drugs and committing serial murder on the side. Arrested in May 1970, as a suspect in the rape-murder of an eighty-five-year-old Albany, New York, woman, Gary managed to pin the blame on an acquaintance.

Eventually after several stints behind bars on lesser charges, he escaped from prison and made his way back to his native city, Columbus, Georgia. Between September 1977 and April 1978, that city was rocked by a string of murders committed by a shadowy intruder dubbed the “Stocking Strangler.” His victims were seven white women, the youngest fifty-nine, the oldest just shy of ninety. After embarking on a string of restaurant holdups, Gary was arrested for armed robbery in 1978 and sentenced to twenty years in jail. Four years later, however, he escaped. He wasn’t nabbed for good until May 1984. Charged with three of the “Stocking Strangler” murders, he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to die in Georgia’s electric chair.

Other African-American serial killers include:

Coral Watts. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Watts began dreaming of killing women in his childhood. When a psychiatrist asked if these dreams disturbed him, Watts replied: “No, I feel better after I have one.” He first assaulted a woman when he was fifteen years old. When asked about his motives, he shrugged, “I felt like beating her up.” He began to make his homicidal dreams a reality in 1980 when he terrorized Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the “Sunday Morning Slasher.” Falling under suspicion, he relocated to Houston, where he killed an indeterminate number of women, perhaps as many as forty. Finally arrested in 1982, he struck a controversial deal with the prosecutor’s office, confessing to thirteen murders in exchange for a burglary conviction and sixty-year sentence. Despite a public outcry, he is slated to be paroled in 2006 at the age of fifty-eight.

She was evil. I could see it in her eyes.

—Coral Watts, explaining his reasons for killing one of his thirteen admitted victims Alton Coleman. During a fifty-three-day period in the summer of 1984, Coleman, along with his female accomplice Debra Brown, murdered eight people in five Midwestern states, beginning with seven-year-old Tamika Turks of Gary, Indiana. After raping the little girl, Coleman jumped up and down on her chest until her rib cage fractured and punctured her vital organs. His other victims, all black, ranged in age from fifteen to seventy-seven. Some were strangled, some stabbed, others bludgeoned or shot.

Besides serial murder, Coleman committed at least seven rapes during this period, as well as three kidnappings and fourteen armed robberies. Arrested in July 1984, he was tried and convicted in three different states: Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. He managed to delay his execution until April 26, 2002, when—after devouring a last meal of filet mignon, fried chicken, corn bread, biscuits with brown gravy, french fries, broccoli with cheese, salad, onion rings, collard greens, sweet potato pie with whipped cream, and butter pecan ice cream—he was put to death by lethal injection. Relatives of his many victims watched on closed-circuit TV.

Celeophus Prince, Jr. Unlike most serial killers, Prince preyed exclusively on victims outside his own race. Between January and September 1990, he brutally murdered six women in the San Diego community of Clairemont, stabbing one of them more than fifty times and leaving bloody circles smeared on his victims’ breasts as a “signature.” His MO involved following unsuspecting women to their homes, then breaking in and butchering them with a kitchen knife. Like Alton Coleman—whose victims included an Ohio woman and her ten-year-old daughter—Prince murdered a mother and daughter, then bragged about the double killing to a friend and took to wearing the dead woman’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck. Dubbed the “Clairemont Killer” during his nine-month reign of terror, he was the object of the largest police manhunt in the history of San Diego. Arrested in September 1991, he was eventually convicted of six counts of first-degree murder, twenty counts of burglary, and one count of rape. He remains on San Quentin’s death row, awaiting execution.

Wayne Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders

More than twenty years after the accused perpetrator was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, questions continue to surround the case of the so-called Atlanta Child Murders. The story began in July 1979, when a woman scavenging the roadside for empties stumbled on the corpses of two African-American boys, one shot dead with a .22-caliber pistol, the other asphyxiated. Over the next two years, twenty-seven more victims would be added to the official list of homicides connected to the killer.

During that fearful time, the case would spark panic and outrage in Atlanta’s black community, generate nationwide media attention (including an article in the New York Times Magazine that would feature the earliest documented use of the term “serial killer”), and bring help from the highest reaches of the government, up to and including the president himself. And not even the arrest and conviction of the

prime suspect put an end to the controversy.

Right from the start, the killings posed an enormous problem for law enforcement agents. There was no consistency—no identifiable signature— in terms of the killer’s MO. Most of the victims were strangled, but some were shot, others stabbed or bludgeoned to death. And though most of the victims were males, a few were young girls. On March 4, 1980, for example, twelve-year-old Angel Lenair left her house to play after completing her homework and never returned. Six days later, her body was found lashed to a tree, an electrical cord tied around her neck and someone else’s panties stuffed down her throat.

As his reign of terror continued, moreover, the killer began to prey on older victims: twenty-year-old Larry Rogers, twenty-one-year-old Eddie Duncan, twenty-three-year-old Michael McIntosh, twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater.

Wayne Williams

(Bill Lignante—ABC News)

By the spring of 1980, the city’s African-American community was in an uproar over the failure of the police to stop the killings. Rumors swirled that the Ku Klux Klan was on a campaign to annihilate the black youth of Atlanta, while Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality went public with a theory that the murders were the work of a Satanic cult. Dozens of bounty hunters—drawn by the prospect of a hundred-thousand-dollar reward—descended on the city. Celebrities from Burt Reynolds to Muhammad Ali offered financial assistance while President Reagan pledged federal funds to help track down the killer. A special task force—including thirty-five FBI agents—interviewed 20,000 people in person and another 150,000 over the phone.

The case began to break in the early-morning hours of May 22, 1981, when officers on stakeout at a bridge over the Chattahoochee River heard a loud splash and halted the car that was crossing the span.

Its driver was a twenty-three-year-old African-American named Wayne Williams.

There was certainly nothing in Williams’s background that matched the typical profile of a serial killer.

The son of schoolteacher parents, he grew up in a stable and loving household where he was encouraged to cultivate his talents. A radio enthusiast who dreamed of making it big in the music business, he showed a great deal of early promise. By the time he was sixteen, he was broadcasting music from a radio station he had set up in the basement of his home. Besides electronics, he had a keen interest in photography and became highly skilled with a camera.

Still, there were definite signs that all was not right with the enterprising young Williams. Despite his intelligence and ambition, he couldn’t make it through college, dropping out of Georgia State after just one year. His dream of discovering the next Stevie Wonder came to nothing, and he gained a reputation as a blowhard and liar—the kind of person who claims to have important contacts and is always making big promises that never pan out. An extreme loner, he had no real social relationships and continued to live with his parents into his twenties. He also began displaying some troubling behavioral traits, including a fondness for impersonating police officers (a common tendency among serial killers), as well as a morbid interest in accident scenes—the grislier the better. Monitoring police transmissions on his shortwave, he rushed to the sites of car wrecks or fires or even plane crashes, shooting photographs and videos, then peddling them to the local media.

After being stopped on the bridge, Williams was questioned and let go. Two days later, however, a corpse was fished out of the river, and he was brought into the station for another grilling. Afterward—playing to the media—he staged an at-home news conference, loudly proclaiming his innocence and offering various alibis that subsequently proved to be full of holes. While the police put him under round-the-clock surveillance, forensic specialists worked frantically to link him to the crimes.

When FBI scientists were finally able to match fibers and dog hairs found on several of the victims to Williams’s car mats, home carpeting, and bedspread, police moved in and arrested him on June 21, 1981.

At his nine-week trial, the prosecution portrayed Williams as a violent homosexual filled with racial self-loathing who harbored a virulent contempt for black youths. Witnesses were produced who testified to having seen Williams in the company of several victims. Toward the end of the trial, the defense put Williams on the stand, but the tactic backfired when he was goaded into a display of uncontrolled anger, denouncing the prosecutor as a “fool” and lashing out at various government agents. In the end—despite his impassioned protestations of innocence—he was convicted of two counts of murder and given a life sentence for each.

Even today, many people believe that Williams was railroaded: that the circumstantial evidence on which he was convicted was flimsy at best and possibly manufactured by the government; that key information that might have aided his case was suppressed; that Williams received inadequate representation.

One fact, however, suggests that the cops got the right man after all: once Wayne Williams was arrested, the Atlanta Child Murders stopped.

“Killer kids” who commit mass murder have become an all-too-common feature of contemporary American society. During the late 1990s there seemed to be a veritable epidemic of them: sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham of Pearl, Mississippi, who killed three schoolmates and wounded seven after knifing to death his own mother; fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal of West Paducah, Kentucky, who gunned down three fellow students and wounded five others at an early-morning prayer meeting; fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, who murdered his parents, then shot twenty-four students, killing two; Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson—ages eleven and thirteen—who set off a fire alarm at school to draw their classmates outside, then opened fire, killing four students and a teacher. And, of course, the Columbine killers: seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold and eighteen-year-old Eric Harris, whose April 1999 massacre in Littleton, Colorado left a dozen students and a teacher dead and twenty-three other people wounded.