Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (48 page)

Forensic psychologist Stephen J. Giannangelo suggests that serial killers be given a new and separate category in the next DSM edition. He proposes the following category:

312.40 Homicidal Pattern Disorder

1. Deliberate and purposeful murder or attempt at murder of strangers on more than one occasion.
   
2. Tension or affective arousal at some time before the act.
   
3. Pleasure, gratification, or relief in commission or reflection of the acts.
   
4. Personality traits consistent with diagnosis of at least one Cluster B Personality Disorder (antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic).
   
5. Understanding the illegality of actions and continuation to avoid apprehension.
   
6. Murders not motivated by monetary gain, to conceal criminal activity, to express anger or vengeance, in response to a delusion or hallucination, or as a result of impaired judgment (e.g., in dementia, mental retardation, substance intoxication).
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SIX
SERIAL KILLERS AS CHILDREN:
The Making of Monsters

I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing.
—
ED KEMPER
Mother was my biggest fear.
—
PETER WOODCOCK

From the case histories of Peter Woodcock, Edward Kemper, Kenneth Bianchi, and Jerry Brudos in previous chapters, one can see that these killers had all exhibited abnormal behavior in their childhood combined with unusual family circumstances: Woodcock, given up for adoption; Kemper, abused by a neurotic, overbearing mother; Bianchi, subjected to his mother’s neurotic fears; Brudos, subjected to his mother’s derision. But many people are given up for adoption, and many grow up with domineering mothers—they do not all become serial killers. Were these killers born with something that made them respond with murder to the circumstances of their childhood? For example, both Woodcock and Kemper killed their family pets at a very early age—the killer instinct was apparently there in early childhood. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam also killed his adopted mother’s pet bird. Animal cruelty along with bedwetting and acts of arson are frequently found in the behavioral history of serial killers when they were children.

Scientists and psychologists have been puzzling for decades over the mystery of serial killers and have collected a huge amount of data that is beginning to reveal certain distinct patterns. The most groundbreaking study was probably the one carried out by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit in which FBI agents interviewed thirty-six sex murderers, including serial killers, about every detail of their life and crime. Since then, many other projects have attempted to confront the question of what motivates serial killers. The conclusion is that serial killers are
both
made and born.

When children born with certain predetermined factors are then subjected to certain life experiences, they are highly likely to become serial killers. But it is not a simple and predictable one-two-three step-by-step progression. Unraveling the making of a serial killer is like aligning a Rubik’s Cube.

The Serial Killer As Infant

The single most common factor attributed to serial killers is the likely absence of infant bonding. From the very first weeks an infant attempts to establish contact with its mother through smiles, gestures, and crying. If its efforts are rewarded with affectionate touching and attention, a baby reaches out into the world to grasp and feed. As it grows, an infant begins to distinguish between strangers and parents and between various familiar people, and it seeks close contact with its parents in a bonding process. These early stages are crucial to the adult personality because it is believed that 50 percent of a human’s “life knowledge,” which forms the behavioral and personality components, is acquired in the first twelve months, and another 25 percent in the second year. The remaining 25 percent of life knowledge is acquired between age three and death. It is believed that infants who are deprived of human affection and touch can be substantially developed psychopaths by age two, lacking a normally developed range of human emotions such as sympathy, empathy, remorse, and affection.

It is questionable how much affection Peter Woodcock’s birth mother would have shown him during the month she had him, knowing that he would be given up for adoption. It is therefore possible that no amount of loving care could have overcome the damage already done to Peter Woodcock before the Maynard family took him in.

Adoption is a frequent characteristic of serial killers. Kenneth Bianchi was adopted, as were David Berkowitz and Joel Rifkin, who murdered seventeen prostitutes in the New York area. Berkowitz and Rifkin interestingly enough are among the few rare cases of Jewish serial killers—although Berkowitz became a born-again Christian shortly before he began killing. Both were adopted into loving and stable families, which challenges the argument that chaotic family environment alone can create a serial killer.

The Serial Killer As the Lonely Child

One very common factor in the childhood of serial killers is their loneliness and isolation from their peers—even in cases where there is little or no maladjustment in parental histories. As children, they rarely fit in with their playmates. Henry Lucas and Albert DeSalvo were obviously isolated from other children outside their family by their living conditions, but the histories of other serial killers are frequently typical of Peter Woodcock’s. By the subtle rules of childhood society, they do not fit in—something is already out of kilter in their personalities.

Both Berkowitz and Rifkin had lonely childhoods and harbored secret aggressive fantasies. Berkowitz surreptitiously crushed boxes of his grandparents’ fragile matzoh and saltine crackers. His grandparents always thought the damage had happened in the store. Like Woodcock, he killed his adopted mother’s pet—in this case, a bird. Berkowitz had no childhood friends. He said, “It was a mysterious force working against me. I felt bothered and tormented, ‘Die Schmutz’ [Yiddish for ‘the dirty one’].”

Rifkin was adopted by college-educated parents who were very supportive of him and sensitive to his handicap—dyslexia, a learning disability that makes it difficult to read and spell correctly. (Lee Harvey Oswald also had it.) Rifkin unfortunately was also clumsy and stuttered slightly, isolating him from his peers. He was bullied and the butt of jokes throughout his high school career, and he maintained a very lonely existence despite his place on the track team and position as yearbook photographer. When the yearbook came out, all the students who worked on it threw a party—and Joel was the only one not invited. Rifkin showed no signs of anger and frequently took the abuse in stoic silence. Later, however, he revealed that he secretly harbored fantasies of torturing and killing passive female slaves.

Rifkin made it into his first year of community college and had several girlfriends, but he appeared to them uncommunicative and unemotional. By now Rifkin was patronizing prostitutes. He brought one home to his parents’ house and she subsequently robbed him. The next one he brought home, he killed. He went on to murder seventeen women until 1992, when police discovered a corpse in his pickup truck during a routine stop.

In 1998 police arrested twenty-seven-year-old Kendall Francois—a six-foot-four, 300-pound public school hall monitor nicknamed “Stinky” because of his bad personal hygiene. He was charged with the murder of eight Poughkeepsie, New York, prostitutes. They were found in plastic bags in the attic of his parents’ house and under the front porch. The entire neighborhood complained about the smell, but Francois convinced his parents it was coming from dead raccoons in the attic.

Kendall was taunted throughout his childhood because of his excessive weight. When he passed by, the children taunted the overweight black youth, “How now brown cow.” He is remembered by his fellow students and teachers as a “gentle giant” with limited intellectual abilities. He participated on the wrestling and football teams and attempted to adopt various identities. One high school picture shows him standing apart from the wrestling team, showing off his recently developed muscles. Another picture shows him posing in a preppy cardigan, his hand thoughtfully poised beneath his chin, a school ring prominently visible on his finger. But again, Kendall had no friends in school.

Loneliness gives these individuals time and space within which to develop, evolve, and dwell upon a fantasy life. The hostile and disempowering circumstances behind their loneliness often gives these fantasies a nasty and violent context focused on revenge and the desire for power. (See the discussion on the role of fantasy later in this chapter.)

The Serial Killer and His Mother

Feminist theoreticians deeply dislike the mother component of serial killer theory, dismissing it as just another aspect of the “blame it on mother” gynocidal aspect of the male drive to kill females. Perhaps. Nonetheless, there are remarkably many serial killers whose mothers showed tendency to be highly controlling, overbearing, or overprotective of their sons.

This supports the theory that some serial killers’ behaviors are rooted in gender identification involving a boy’s ability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother—a challenge not faced by females. When a boy cannot achieve this autonomy or when there is no solid foundation for him from which to negotiate this autonomy, a sense of rage develops in the child, and he subsequently carries the anger into adolescence and adulthood.

We saw that Kenneth Bianchi’s adopted mother seemed to be hysterically concerned with Kenneth’s health as a child, and that the child responded to these concerns with ailments. Peter Woodcock’s foster mother is described as highly controlling and seems to have relished the challenge of her troubled foster child’s behavioral problems. Upon being arrested, Woodcock feared only one thing: “My fear was that Mother would find out. Mother was my biggest fear. I didn’t know if the police would let her at me.” Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, is remembered as a normal child except for his strange need to constantly cling to his mother’s skirt. Joseph Kallinger’s mother refused to allow him to play outside, flogged him with a whip, beat him with a hammer, threatened to cut off his genitals, and selected his wife for him. Ed Gein so worshipped his mother that he preserved her bedroom as a shrine (but not her corpse, as in the Hitchcock movie
Psycho.
)

Other serial killers have had mothers who were either rejecting or blatantly abusive of them. Even in his adult life, Arthur Shawcross was obsessed with pleasing his critical mother. Just before he was arrested for killing eleven prostitutes, he had sent his mother a carefully selected expensive gift, which she kept but wrote back that he was a fool for wasting his money on stupid junk. Edmund Kemper’s mother kept him locked in the basement; Jerry Brudos’s mom stuck him in the back shed. One does not need a degree in psychology to understand why children like that may grow up hating females and harboring raging homicidal fantasies.

Cases of serial killers—particularly sexual killers—where the mother was characterized as loving and encouraging toward the son’s independence are rare except in some cases of adopted children—or in the case of Ted Bundy, who thought he was adopted.

The father seems to play a lesser role in the formation of the serial killer. Nonetheless, abusive or offender fathers frequently become role models in the child’s future.

Family Stability and History

The FBI study reveals that sexual and serial killers often came from unstable family backgrounds where infant bonding was likely to be disrupted. Only 57 percent of killers in the FBI study had both parents at birth, and 47 percent had their father leave before age twelve. A mother as the dominant parent was reported in 66 percent of the cases, and 44 percent reported having a negative relationship with their mother. A negative relationship with the father or male parental figure was reported by 72 percent of the convicted sex killers.

The history of the parents had also a great role to play in the child’s future. Researchers at the Washington School of Medicine determined that biological children of parents with criminal records are four times as likely to commit criminal acts themselves as adults—even if they have been adopted by law-abiding parents! The FBI study showed that 50 percent of the offenders had parents with criminal pasts and 53 percent came from families with psychiatric histories.
¹⁶¹

Gerald Gallego, Jr., for example, was nine years old when his twenty-six-year-old father, Gerald Gallego, Sr., was executed in Mississippi’s gas chamber for two murders. When Gerald Jr. was thirteen he was charged with having sex with a six-year-old girl. By age thirty-two he had been married seven times and was living in California.

William Mansfield, Jr., on whose property in Florida police discovered the remains of at least six murdered women, was the son of William Mansfield, Sr., serving a thirty-year prison term for child molestation.

The FBI’s research program describes one unnamed killer’s background:

The offender’s father shot and killed one of his own brothers when the subject was thirteen. Prior to this crime, the father had been investigated concerning acts of arson and insurance fraud. The father was tried for the murder but found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was diagnosed during the trial as suffering from paranoia. The father was also suspected in the killings of two other persons, including a trespasser on his property and a foster child who had disappeared. After the murder, the father was committed to a state mental hospital; however, two years later he escaped with the help of the subject’s mother.
¹⁶²