Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (26 page)

While on death row awaiting execution, he was asked if he felt guilty about the murders he had committed. Guilt, he said, is an illusionary mechanism to control people and is unhealthy and does terrible things to people’s bodies. Bundy replied that he felt as sorry for those who felt guilt as he did for drug addicts or businessmen who craved money. It solves nothing. It only hurts you, he said.

Bundy had committed many of his murders in King County in Washington State. In 1982 a new serial killer took his place there—the Green River Killer. Robert D. Keppel was now a senior investigator when Bundy offered to profile the Green River Killer for him. Keppel accepted and secretly met with Bundy, not only to take advantage of Bundy’s expertise in serial murder but to also probe further into Bundy’s own crimes and possible locations where missing victims might be found. Keppel found Bundy’s insight into serial killers perceptive. At the same time he marveled at Bundy’s ego and his sense of superiority over the Green River Killer. Keppel said, “The Leonardo da Vinci of serial murder was Theodore Robert Bundy’s perception of himself.”

Bundy himself proclaimed, “I’m the only Ph.D. in serial murder. Over the years I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about it. The subject fascinates me.”

Bundy explained his crimes in the context of young urban professional ambition when he said, “Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it’s not practical. There are no stereotypes. The thing is that some people are just psychologically less ready for failure than others.”

After years of numerous appeals and motions, Bundy was executed in January 1989. Carole Boone and Ted’s daughter had vanished from the public eye several years earlier, and it is not known if they stayed in contact with Bundy. Ted may have died alone. On Florida campuses, students hosted “Bundy-Qs” and chanted, “Fry, Bundy, Fry” on the day he was electrocuted.

 The Disorganized Serial Killer: Miguel Rivera—“Charlie Chop-Off”

An example of the disorganized class of serial killers, Miguel Rivera randomly attacked young boys in tenement buildings in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side of New York between March 1972 and August 1973. His first victim, an eight-year-old boy, was stabbed thirty-eight times and sodomized, and an attempt was made to cut off his penis. Three other boys were found in hallways, in basements, and on the rooftops of various tenements, stabbed to death and their genitals cut off. Local children dubbed the serial killer “Charlie Chop-Off.” Witness testimony produced a description of a Puerto Rican suspect who was attempting to persuade young boys to run errands for him. Following a failed attempt to kidnap a nine-year-old boy in May 1974, Miguel Rivera, who exhibited severe signs of mental illness, was arrested. Rivera claimed that God had told him to transform little boys into girls. The hidden logic and erratic behavior of the disorganized serial killer makes it difficult for police to narrow down a suspect, even though he often makes no attempt to cover up his crimes.

Herbert Mullin, whose case is described in the next chapter (see the “Visionary” section), is also a classic case study of the disorganized class of serial killer, as is Richard Chase, described in Chapter 9.

 The Mixed-Category Serial Killer: Richard Ramirez—The “Night Stalker”

Richard Ramirez, who committed most of his crimes in Los Angeles, is an example of a mixed-category murderer. Between June 1984 and August 1985, nineteen people were brutally killed inside their homes by a mysterious intruder who was dubbed the “Night Stalker” by the press. Men were shot or strangled, while women were brutally raped and mutilated. He gouged out one victim’s eyes with a spoon and took them away with him. One night, he killed three victims, on other nights, he left without killing his victims. At the crime scenes, the Night Stalker left occult symbols such as an inverted pentagram drawn on a wall with a victim’s lipstick. Some crime scenes were signed “Jack the Knife.” One victim who survived reported that as she was being raped, he forced her to recite, “I love Satan.” When asked where they hid their valuables, victims were ordered to “swear on Satan” that they were telling the truth. The crimes were committed completely at random, and the killer made unsuccessful attempts to disguise his fingerprints. His victims often saw his face, and he left them alive as often as he killed them. Outside the windows of the houses he entered, he left behind his shoe prints. When the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit was asked to profile the crime scenes, they responded that the crimes were unique and did not conform to anything they had seen before.

In 1985 California installed a new $25 million computer system—Cal-ID—that could automatically search out fingerprints from previous crimes and match them to prints on record. The official story is that within several minutes of being online, the computer used the prints left behind by the Night Stalker to identify him as Richard Ramirez, a twenty-five-year-old petty burglar from El Paso, Texas. The real story is that police had first developed leads from several street informants who dealt in stolen goods. They revealed that a burglar they knew named Rick, Ricardo, or Richard Ramirez was weird enough to be the Night Stalker. Police ran those names through the computer and quickly came up with a match on a fingerprint from an abandoned car connected to one of the crimes.
⁹⁷

Pictures of Ramirez were widely publicized in California, and it was not long before he was sighted on a street in a residential Los Angeles neighborhood. The police had to rescue him from a mob intent on beating him to death.

Richard Ramirez was a mentally disturbed drifter with a cocaine addiction who frequented the skid row district around the Los Angeles bus station. He was the youngest brother in a devout Catholic Mexican family. Ramirez’s father was a former Mexican police officer and a domineering and tyrannical parent whose temper frightened all the kids. His mother was deeply religious, frequently praying, lighting candles, and regularly attending church.

We will later see that frequently serial killers sustained head injuries as children; Ramirez was accidentally knocked unconscious twice as a child. He also had epileptic seizures. When Ramirez was seven or eight he might have witnessed his older brothers being sexually molested by a neighbor. Neither he nor his brothers can remember whether Ramirez himself was victimized. Ramirez is remembered as shy and sweet, and his teenage girlfriend with whom he had a relationship several years before the murders also remembers him as a gentle and sweet lover. Girls at his school remember Ramirez as being “nice.”

When Ramirez was twelve years old he began to hang out with his cousin Mike, a Green Beret who had recently returned from two tours of duty in Vietnam. They frequently smoked marijuana together, and Mike regaled the impressionable Richard with war stories. According to Ramirez, his cousin showed him black-and-white Polaroids of Vietnamese women forced to perform fellatio on soldiers. Other photographs showed the severed heads of the same women. Ramirez said that he became highly aroused at the sight of those images. On May 4, 1974, while on a visit at Mike’s house, Richard saw his cousin shoot his wife to death in cold blood. Mike told him never to say that he had been there and sent him home. Ramirez remained mute about what he had seen, while Mike was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental facility.

Several days after the shooting, Richard visited the apartment with his parents to retrieve some of Mike’s property. Ramirez recently recalled: “That day I went back to that apartment, it was like some kind of mystical experience. It was all quiet and still and hot in there. You could smell the blood.”

After witnessing the homicide, Richard began to steal and habitually smoke marijuana. His interest in school declined. Making matters worse, he went to Los Angeles to visit his older brother, a heroin-addicted thief who instructed Richard on the finer arts of burglary.

When he was thirteen, Richard moved away from home to live with another brother. There he began experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, mushrooms, and PCP—angel dust—a highly unstable and dangerous drug normally used as a horse tranquilizer. Richard became obsessed with slasher horror films such as
Halloween
and
Friday the 13th.
He was into heavy metal, especially the darker stuff from Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Billy Idol, Ozzy Osborne, and AC/DC. Soon he dropped out of school.

In 1978 Richard left El Paso and returned to live in Los Angeles, settling into the cheap seedy hotels in the downtown tenderloin district. He became addicted to cocaine, which he would inject. In summary, Ramirez had head injuries, had epilepsy, had a tyrannical father and an overly religious mother, was perhaps sexually molested, was exposed to graphically violent images, witnessed a murder at age twelve in which he was complicit by his silence, smoked marijuana, consumed LSD and PCP, and entertained himself by watching horror films and listening to heavy metal, before he became addicted to the ultimate paranoia-inducing drug—cocaine, which he did not merely snort, but injected. Young Richard’s brain no doubt was seriously fried and his soul battered when he added one more thing into the mix at age seventeen: In the summer of 1978 he read
The Satanic Bible
by Anton LaVey—a San Francisco self-styled satanist. So impressed was Richard that he stole a car and drove to San Francisco, where he sought out LaVey and attended his satanic rituals, during which he says he felt the hand of Satan touch him.

Between 1978 and 1984 Ramirez became almost entirely estranged from his family, including his brothers. He rarely contacted them and we know little about his activities. In mid-1983 his sister sought him out and found him living in a fleabag hotel near the L.A. bus station. He was still injecting cocaine and sustaining himself by committing burglaries. He told his sister that Satan was protecting him from arrest.

On June 27, 1984, he committed his first known murder, stabbing a woman to death as she slept in her bed. He would kill at least nineteen victims, raping, stabbing, shooting, mutilating, and bludgeoning them, before his capture on August 31, 1985.

At his trial Ramirez flashed press photographers with an inverted pentagram inked on his palm and chanted “Evil, evil . . .” When he was convicted and sentenced to death, he growled at the court, “I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society . . . I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards; truly trematodes of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession. . . . You maggots make me sick; hypocrites one and all . . . And no one knows that better than those who kill for policy, clandestinely or openly, as do the governments of the world, which kill in the name of god and country or for whatever reason they deem appropriate . . . I don’t need to hear all of society’s rationalizations. I’ve heard them all before and the fact remains that what is, is. You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it . . . I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil, legions of the night—night breed—repeat not the errors of the Night Stalker and show no mercy . . . I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of us! . . . See you in Disneyland.”

We can see that Ramirez fits both categories of organized and disorganized serial killers. He killed his victims in their homes at random, not always sure whom he would find when he entered houses. He overcame them with a fast “blitz”-type attack using extreme force. He left many of his victims alive, suggesting that when he made a decision to kill he made it spontaneously at the scene. He did not disguise his face and left forensic evidence behind, traits of a disorganized killer. On the other hand, Ramirez brought weapons to the scene and even carried a police frequency scanner, traits of an organized offender. Ramirez is a mixed-category serial killer in the FBI system.

In Chapter 9, which deals with profiling, we will return to a more extensive discussion of some of the problems of the organized/disorganized profiling system used by the FBI. Next, however, we explore how the dissatisfaction with the organized/disorganized model of serial killer behavior led to the evolution of alternate and more complex categories.