Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (37 page)

He usually completes his education but is perceived as an underachiever. His military record likewise will show a history of an obedient but undistinguished soldier.

He is immature and lives life as an observer, not a participant. He lacks self-confidence and with his parents may live on a subsistence-level income or be employed in minimum-wage menial jobs. Familiarity is crucial to his confidence and he often works, lives, and commits his crimes in the same neighborhood. His most common means of transportation is walking, but if he owns a car, it will be run-down and poorly maintained. He leaves behind a disorganized crime scene.

ANGER-RETALIATORY KILLERS

With anger-retaliatory killers, both the rape and the murder are planned. The murder often involves “overkill”—excessive violence beyond what is necessary to kill the victim, who is usually female. The primary motive driving the killer is his need to avenge, get even with, or retaliate against a female, or her substitute, who somehow offended the killer in his perception. The rage is often inspired by a female with power presently or in the past over the offender—his mother, wife, teacher, or work supervisor. The rage is triggered when either the same female or another, in his perception, criticizes, scolds, humiliates, rejects, belittles, or somehow disrespects him, but the focus of his attack will be most likely an unsuspecting substitute victim.

The substitute victim will probably be the same age as or older than the offender and was previously selected as a potential victim. The offender would have seen the victim in the vicinity of his neighborhood or his place of work and noted her address and vulnerability level. Once angered, the offender usually walks to the crime scene to attack his prese-lected symbolic victim. If the offender uses a vehicle, he may drive to the scene but walk the last two or three hundred feet.

On some occasions, the anger-retaliatory killer may strike at the actual person who has angered him. In these cases, the victim is almost always younger than the offender or a child.

The offender may use some kind of ruse to get into the victim’s premises and then stage a confrontation with the victim, acting inappropriately to elicit a negative response from the victim. He unleashes a blitz attack, striking the victim in the face and mouth. As the attack escalates, he may use some object found at the scene to pummel or stab the victim. Ejaculate might not be found at the scene, as the primary focus of the attack is the assault on the victim. The offender’s age, emotional maturity, and experience govern whether he will be able to get an erection during the attack.

The assault will continue until the killer’s anger is satiated, even if the victim is long dead. When he is finished, the killer will position the body in a submissive pose: on its side away from the door, facedown, or with something covering the eyes. The crime scene is disorganized and the murder weapon is often found near the victim. Before leaving, the offender frequently takes some souvenir or token from the victim. He experiences no sense of guilt because he transfers blame for the murder to the victim and easily slips into a serial pattern of offenses.

The anger-retaliatory killer is usually in his mid to late twenties, impulsive, quick-tempered, and egotistically self-centered. He may be perceived as having an explosive personality. He is not a loner, but maintains shallow social relations, sometimes only limited to drinking buddies, and rarely reveals anything about himself to them. He may play team contact sports.

He feels both dependent and resistant in his relationships with women and often uses violence to resolve the conflict. If he is married, there will probably be a history of spousal abuse and extra marital relations. He may have a police record reflecting impulsive offenses such as assault, reckless driving, and threatening.

He is sexually frustrated and frequently impotent and has highly eroticized his anger, linking it to his sexual inadequacy. He does not consume pornography but he may exhibit some curiosity toward soft erotica like
Playboy.

He had disciplinary problems in high school and is frequently an underachiever or dropout. Likewise, if he has a military record, there are often disciplinary problems and early termination of service. In general there is a history of conflicts with authority.

ANGER-EXCITATION KILLERS

Anger-excitation killers plan both the rape and the murder. The primary motive is to inflict pain and terror on the male or female victim for the sexual gratification of the perpetrator. The crime is characterized by prolonged torture and mutilation of the victim, generally before death. The murder itself is on a lower priority for the offender, who focuses on the process leading up to it. The offender has highly specialized and elaborate fantasies focused on his need to express power and control. The crime is highly ritualized and often played out in a tightly scripted scenario, which evolves and is perfected victim by victim.

The victim is often a stranger who fits into an ideal victim type for the perpetrator: a student, a prostitute, a child, an elderly person, a “slut,” a nurse, and so on. The offender might alternatively show partiality in his victim preference: blond hair, long legs, blue eyes, small stature. There might be fetishistic elements as well: a type of shoe worn by the victim, color of clothing, and so on. The offender often approaches, seduces, and charms the victim. He maintains the ruse until he can isolate the victim from safety. At that point, the offender’s behavior vacillates between friendly and threatening until he entirely drops his mask. He may very calmly and matter-of-factly tell the victim, “I am now going to rape and torture you for three days and then I am going to kill you slowly and painfully,” to savor the fear in the victim.

Once the offender senses the fear, he begins a highly ritualized session of torture and degradation based on a complex of fantasies that the offender might have developed since early childhood. The offender may attempt to rape the victim and ejaculate at the moment of the death.

After death, there are frequently secondary sexual assaults: insertion of objects, mutilation, and harvesting of body parts. The body might be left in a bizarre state of dress or undress, reflecting some fetishistic focus. Items of clothing might be cut away, taken, or found neatly folded nearby. Often clothing, body parts, or other souvenirs are taken away and used for repetitive sessions of compulsive masturbation by the offender. It could be said that the offense continues in the offender’s comfort zone, far away from the victim’s body, and does not cease until the offender is emotionally satiated and completes his masturbatory arc.

The anger-excitation killer maintains a “murder kit,” consisting of a murder weapon, restraints, and instruments of torture, which he brings with him to the crime scene and carefully packs up and takes away afterward for safekeeping. The offender is highly alert to leaving behind possible forensic evidence, and frequently moves the body from the murder scene to another location and conceals it. He tends to commit his offenses and dump the bodies away from his residence or place of work. He may, however, then interject himself into the search for the victim or the police investigation of the murder in order to stimulate himself further.

The anger-excitation killer’s age is variable but usually he is a mature individual who often commits his first murder by age thirty-five. He is often a physically attractive, bright, and seemingly social individual. He appears to be law-abiding and conventional. He may frequently have a good marriage and be a doting father to his children, and be gainfully employed in a position requiring minimal supervision, or he may be self-employed in a semiskilled trade such as carpentry or mechanics. He shows signs of being compulsively organized and may have had several years of college education or graduated. If he has military service, his record is usually good and he may have been selected as a potential candidate for officer training.

Essentially, the anger-excitation killer lives a double life, carefully separating his conventional life from his fantasy-driven one. He probably maintains a private space where he keeps his murder kit, souvenirs, and other fetishistic tokens—a kind of dark secret chamber of horrors in the basement, the attic, a closet, the garage, or some nearby abandoned structure. He will be a consumer of sadistic pornographic literature and imagery.

Offense Distribution of the Proposed Categories

In October 1995 there were 41,584 inmates in the Michigan corrections system, of which 14 percent were serving terms for homicide (5,928 killers). Of those, 2,476 offenders—42 percent of all the murderers—had committed sexual homicides. Unfortunately the study did not differentiate between single and serial offenders.
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The distribution among categories indicated that power-assertive offenders consisted of 38 percent of sexual killers, anger-retaliatory 34 percent, power-reassurance 21 percent, and anger-excitation a mere 7 percent.

Other Classifications and Typologies

While the types described previously seem to be the most often cited in serial homicide analysis, serial killers can be shuffled into many different categories and types. These categories can be based on all sorts of criteria: psychological, pathological, criminal, social, and even astrological. One astrological study found that many serial killers were born under the sign of Gemini or Sagittarius: Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Wayne Williams, Danny Rolling (the Gainesville Ripper), Peter Sutcliffe, Arthur Shawcross, and Richard Chase (the Vampire Killer) were Geminis, while Dennis Nilsen, Ted Bundy, and Edmund Kemper were Sagittarians.
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Serial killers can be classed by their gender or social identity: gay killers, female killers, team killers, cult killers, professional killers, medical killers, family killers, and so on.

Female Serial Killers

So far I have been using the pronoun
he
when referring to serial killers, simply to facilitate the flow of words. However, I should be referring to serial killers as
he or she,
because nearly one out of five serial murderers are women. In fact, they are often more deadly and more prolific than typical male serial killers. Female serial killers are described as the “quiet killers” because they rarely leave bodies dumped by the roadside, which alarm a community. Their killing careers last twice as long as men’s: eight years for women to the male serial killer’s average of just over four years.
¹²⁴
Their killing is often committed at home or in a professional setting such as a hospital, retirement home, boardinghouse, or hotel, where sometimes it is not even noticed or recognized as a murder.

A study of incarcerated female non-serial murderers found that on average 77 percent were unemployed when they committed their offense, 65 percent were black, and 76 percent had children, and their median age was twenty-seven.
¹²⁵
Female killers are young and poor, and often function in a socioeconomic class where interpersonal violence is more frequent and “acceptable.”

The statistics for specifically female serial killers are substantially different: 95 percent were white, their median age was thirty, and only 10 percent were known to be unemployed, while 10 percent were professionals, 10 percent were skilled workers, 15 percent were semiskilled, and 11 percent were other, such as self-employed or business proprietors (and 41 percent unknown).
¹²⁶
Their higher socioeconomic class, where interpersonal violence is less acceptable, suggests some kind of psychopathology behind their crimes. Poor unemployed women living in a society where often responding with interpersonal violence is the only way to survive may commit a spontaneous homicide in the heat of a moment. But the more middle-class female serial killers contemplated and planned their murders carefully.

The motives of female serial killers are substantially different from those of the female single killer or even the male serial killer. On average, 74 percent of female serial killers were at least in part motivated by personal financial gain, a sad reflection on their middle-class aspirations.
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FEMALE SEXUAL SERIAL KILLERS AS ACCOMPLICES

While there are arguably no cases of a single female sexual serial killer operating in a similar manner to the men described in this book, there are numerous cases of women participating in sexually sadistic serial murders as accomplices of a male partner. The male is often the dominant one in the team and commits the actual homicides, but not always. Nearly 44 percent of female serial killers committed their crimes as an accomplice, often in the company of a male partner.

During the mid-1930’s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow undertook a number of studies of sexual behavior related to dominance. He noted that in captivity, the most dominant monkeys engaged in almost constant sex, and that the nature of that sex was often “abnormal”—male monkeys mounting other males and even instances of dominant females mounting males. Maslow concluded that sex in those circumstances was often an expression of dominance rather than of the primates’ sex drive. He also noted that when a new monkey was introduced into the group, the lower-dominance monkeys would act extremely violently toward it. Maslow linked these attacks to low-esteem violence of the type seen in human beings.

Maslow then turned his attention to young college girls, whom he interviewed at great length. In 1939, Maslow concluded that female sexuality is also linked to dominance. He found that people fall into one of three categories: high-dominance, medium-dominance, and low-dominance.