Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (49 page)

Childhood Mental and Physical Trauma

Many serial killers had a truly traumatic childhood. In the FBI study, 42 percent of the killers reported physical abuse and 74 percent reported psychological abuse, while 35 percent reported witnessing sexual violence as children and 43 percent reported being sexually abused themselves. “Sexually stressful events” were reported by 73 percent of sex killers, and 50 percent admitted that their first rape fantasies began between ages twelve and fourteen. It should be noted that the FBI carefully structured its survey to eliminate self-pity and explanatory tendencies from the offenders surveyed: When asked, only 53 percent of the serial and sex killers felt themselves to have been treated unfairly as children, despite the higher reported rates of abuse.

Some psychiatrists explain the development of psychopathic tendencies as simply the brain’s defensive mechanisms. An infant that is denied human touch and affection develops a sense of only itself—it becomes completely oblivious to others. This is necessary for the infant to survive. When that infant becomes an adult, that sense of self and disregard of others becomes defined as “psychopathology.” Thus what starts in the infant’s brain as a purely defensive mechanism can become a destructive trait in adulthood.

Physical trauma, particularly head injuries, is evident in the childhood histories of many serial killers. Earle Leonard Nelson was dragged under a streetcar at age ten and remained in a coma for six days; Carlton Gary, Richard Ramirez, and John Wayne Gacy were knocked unconscious by playground swings; Gary Heidnik fell out of a tree in grade school, causing an injury that prompted his classmates to call him “football head”; Bobby Joe Long fell from a pony and remained nauseated and dizzy for weeks; Max Gufler was subject to uncontrollable outbursts of rage after being struck on the head with a rock at age nine. The FBI sexual killer study showed that 29 percent of the subjects were “accident prone” in childhood.

 Henry Lee Lucas

In some cases it is not that the psychopath necessarily wants to hurt somebody, but that he simply does not care whether he does so or not. Eventually the sexual act becomes interchangeable with murder. Henry Lee Lucas explained, “I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. If I don’t, I don’t. I rape them. I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them. Dogs, I’ve killed them to have with them—always killed before I had sex. I’ve had sex with them while they’re still alive only sometimes. Then killing became the same things as having sex.”
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Officially, Lucas was convicted of killing “only” eleven people, mostly hitchhikers in Texas along Highway I-35. However, he claimed to have committed 360 murders across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, beginning from 1952, when he was fifteen years old, until his arrest in 1982. Police discount some of his confessions and believe that most likely he killed in the vicinity of “only” a hundred people, tops.

At one point in his history, Lucas was joined in his killing by Ottis Elwood Toole, a cannibalistic male prostitute. There was no recognizable sense or pattern to their killing. The victims were men, women, and children. They were young and they were old; they were prostitutes, businessmen, homemakers, tramps, and students. They were strangled, shot, stabbed, and battered to death. Some were raped; others were not. Some were mutilated and cannibalized while others were carefully buried. Some victims have never been identified to this day. Lucas’s childhood history can serve as a manual on how to incubate a serial killer. It includes virtually every factor reported by different serial killers in one single life.

Henry Lee Lucas was born in one of America’s poorest regions—Blacksburg, Virginia—in 1937. Viola Lucas, his mother, was a prostitute; his father, Anderson, was an alcoholic who had earlier in a drunken stupor fallen on some railway tracks and had both his legs amputated by a slowly moving train. He now supported himself and the family by skinning minks, selling pencils, and distilling illicit alcohol. The father taught Henry how to maintain their illegal distillery while he went off to get drunk. Henry himself was drinking hard liquor by age ten, and of his legless father he only remembers, “He hopped around on his ass all his life.”

Viola insisted that both Henry and his father watch her having sex with her customers in a dirt-floor three-room cabin in which they lived. If they refused, she beat them with a club. Henry said, “I don’t think any child out there should be brought up in that type of environment. In the past, I’ve hated it. It’s just inside me hate, and I can’t get away from it.”

One of Lucas’s earliest memories is of his mother shooting one of her customers in the leg with a shotgun after having sex and Henry being splashed with the man’s blood. From then on he seemed to be fascinated by blood and its association with sex.

When Henry was thirteen, his father got drunk, crawled out into the snow, and lay there until he caught pneumonia and died.

Viola beat Henry with broom handles, sticks, pieces of timber, or anything else she found. She did not allow him to cry when she was beating him, and she constantly told him that he was born evil and would die in prison. He claims that the only thing he ever loved was a pet mule, but when his mother found out about his affection for it, she forced him to watch as she shot it dead. She then beat him for how much it was going to cost to haul the dead animal away.

One day when Henry was too slow getting wood for the stove, Viola hit him so hard with a piece of lumber that he remained unconscious for three days until he was finally taken to a hospital. Afterward he recalled frequent incidents of dizziness, blackouts, and weightless sensation. About a year later, while roughhousing with his brother, Henry was accidentally sliced with a knife across his left eye. The eye was left untreated and eventually had to be replaced with a glass eye.

Henry admitted to having sex with his half-brother and to the two of them cutting the throats of animals and performing acts of bestiality. He later said, “Sex is one of my downfalls.”

On his first day of school, Viola sent Henry to class dressed as a girl, with his long hair set in curls and wearing a dress. Ironically, Ottis Toole, who would partner with Lucas in the crime spree, was also dressed as a girl in petticoats and lace by his mother. At least seven male serial killers, including Charles Manson, are known to have been dressed as girls in their childhood. Eddie Cole, who murdered thirteen victims, was dressed as “Mamma’s little girl” by his mother and forced to serve drinks to her guests.
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One would think that serial killers exaggerate their childhood backgrounds in attempt to gain sympathy, and many do. In the case of Henry Lee Lucas, however, the details of his childhood history have been independently corroborated through various sources and witnesses, including his neighbors and former schoolteacher. Lucas was not exaggerating when he said, “They ain’t got, I don’t think, a human being alive that can say he had the childhood I had.”

Biochemistry

There are questions as to whether there are biological factors linked to serial killing. After Henry Lee Lucas was convicted, he underwent numerous neurological tests that revealed fairly extensive brain damage. Small contusions indicated a frontal lobe injury, and there was damage to his temporal lobe and pools of spinal fluid at the base of his brain. There was an enlargement of the right and left Sylvian fissure at the expense of the surrounding brain tissue, which indicated significant loss of judgmental functions and was the result of head injuries sustained in childhood. CAT scans and nuclear magnetic resonance tests confirmed a brain abnormality consistent with an individual with diminished control over violent impulses.

Toxicology tests revealed unusually high levels of lead and cadmium in his nerve tissue, which combined with years of alcohol abuse to destroy a significant part of his cerebral capacity. Three indicators of cadmium poisoning are loss of dream recall, excessively strong body odor, and loss of sense of smell. Lucas does not remember his dreams and rode in a car through Texas heat with the head of one of his victims for more than three days, oblivious to the smell of the decaying flesh. His teacher recalls that as a child, Lucas smelled very bad.

Malnutrition can also be a significant contributor to brain damage. Viola forced Lucas and his father to scrounge for food on the streets and in garbage cans. His teacher reports that she brought him to her home to feed him hot meals, and Lucas recalls that those were the only hot meals he received in his life prior to jail.

Substance Abuse

Maternal alcohol or drug abuse also increases the chances of prenatal injury of the fetus. The FBI study indicated that 69 percent of subjects indicated a family history of alcohol abuse and 33 percent had family problems with drugs.

Other family violence can also potentially injure the unborn child. The father of Patrick Mackay in England repeatedly kicked his wife in the stomach while she was expecting the child. Mackay’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic until he died when Mackay was ten years old. The son then seems to have adopted the father’s identity. He assaulted other children at his school and tortured animals. He became addicted to alcohol at an early age and became, like his father, violent under its influence. By the time he was fifteen, social workers had described Mackay as “a cold psychopathic killer.”

Mackay began killing at age twenty-two in London in 1974. His victims were usually elderly women, whom he would stab or strangle in their homes and then rob. Mackay was caught when he returned to rob a sixty-four-year-old Catholic priest who had helped him two years earlier. He stabbed the priest in his home and then split his head open with an axe; however, this failed to kill the priest. Mackay then put him into a bathtub full of water and sat on the edge for an hour as the priest died. Because the police were aware of the connection between Mackay and the victim, he was apprehended within forty-eight hours and eventually charged with five murders, but suspected in a total of eleven.

In the end, what makes a serial killer still remains a mystery to psychologists. In the case of severely abused children, anyone can understand their eventual emergence as psychopathic killers. But what about David Berkowitz and Peter Woodcock? Although adopted, they seemed to have been brought up in stable and loving homes. Thousands of children are adopted and do not grow up to be serial killers. Thousands of children grow up in conditions far more desperate and abusive than Berkowitz’s and Woodcock’s, and they too do not become serial killers. Part of the problem is that we are no longer sure of what defines a “healthy” and “happy” family. The incidence of abuse, physical and psychological, is often hidden from public eye, and only in the last two decades has the true extent of sexual abuse within families come to the forefront.

Dr. Alice Miller, in her book
For Your Own Good,
maintains that the origins of adult violent behavior are found in a level of cruelty in the upbringing of children that is ostensibly invisible. Miller described a “poisonous pedagogy” in which children are cruelly punished while being told it is “for their own good.” Such demonstrations of pain and punishment as being “good” send the wrong message to the child. Moreover, the parents’ display of their “heroic” suspension of their love and feeling of tenderness for their child in order to inflict punishment upon him—“this hurts me more than it hurts you”—is another disturbing message a child can receive. While parental discipline is a common and necessary aspect of bringing up children, the fine line between abuse and constructive discipline is very murky and difficult to objectively define.

The Role of Fantasy

The agents from the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit who were interviewing convicted serial and sex killers arrived at a different and more complex theory than the one that many psychologists were advancing. The FBI rejected the notion that serial killers murdered as a defensive-reactive response to extremely abusive experiences in their life. What troubled the FBI analysts was the fact that not all serial killers whom they were interviewing suffered severe abuse in childhood. For example, Ted Bundy, although born illegitimate, grew up in an apparently stable, lower-middle-class home with a loving mother and supportive stepfather. Where, why, and how did he develop the rage that led him to kill twenty young women?

The FBI concluded that serial murderers “programmed” or conditioned themselves in childhood to become murderers in a progressively intensifying loop of fantasies. They discovered that the most common childhood trait of serial killers, which also extended into adolescence and adulthood, was daydreaming and compulsive masturbation. As defined in the study, daydreaming is “any cognitive activity representing a shift of attention away from a task.” Fantasy is defined as an elaborate thought with great preoccupation, sometimes expressed as thought, images, or feelings only, anchored in the daydreaming process.
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In the FBI study, 82 percent of offenders reported daydreaming in their childhood. An equal 82 percent reported compulsive masturbation (probably accompanying the daydreams).
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When the offenders reached adolescence and then adulthood, there was only a 1 percent drop in their daydreaming and compulsive masturbation.