Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (50 page)

Fantasies serve to relieve anxiety or fear, and almost everybody has them to one degree or another. A child who is abused may understandably develop aggressive fantasies in which he develops a power and means by which he can destroy his tormentor. But the trigger of these fantasies does not necessarily need to be extraordinarily abusive or violent events—relatively common events such as parental divorce, family illness, or even rejection by a friend can all give a child a sense of loss of control, anxiety, and fear, and may spark aggressive fantasies as a method of coping with the stress.

Only at this point do the other factors noted in the serial killers’ childhood take effect. The child who lacks bonding and a sense of contact with others will internalize his fantasy and cloud the boundary between fantasy and reality. Living in his own private world, the child begins to repeat and elaborate on the fantasy, finding comfort in it while continually narrowing the perimeters between fantasy and reality. Of the killers interviewed in the FBI study, 71 percent reported a sense of isolation in their childhood. As they grew into adolescence, the sense of isolation apparently increased to 77 percent of subjects.
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Such increased social isolation only encourages a reliance on fantasy as a substitute for human encounter. And as we have seen, so many serial killers were lonely and isolated children.

The individual’s personality development becomes dependent on the fantasy life and its themes rather than on social interaction. The total escape and control that the child has in his fantasy world becomes addictive, especially if there are continued stresses in the child’s life.

If the particular fantasy involves violence, revenge, or murder, they become part of that addiction; when they are combined with masturbation, a sexual component to the fantasy is developed. Psychologists identify this process as classical conditioning, in which “the repeated pairing of fantasized cues with orgasm results in their acquiring sexually arousing properties.”
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One serial killer who murdered young boys, John Joseph Joubert, remembers as an adolescent compulsively masturbating to fantasies of strangling and stabbing boys dressed only in their underwear. Joubert said that he could not recall whether these images brought on the masturbation or whether masturbation brought on the fantasies. Violence and sex become merged into a murderous obsession, which often is kept secret. As one unnamed killer in the FBI study said, “Nobody bothered to find out what my problem was, and nobody knew about the fantasy world.”

As the individual continually refines and “improves on” his repeated fantasy, eventually it becomes a rehearsal for future action. At some point the serial killer, as an adolescent or as an adult (and occasionally even as a child), begins to take his fantasy out into the world on “test runs.” This testing of the fantasy is what Ed Kemper was doing when he went to his schoolteacher’s house at night armed with a knife and a fantasy of making love to her corpse. Thirteen-year-old John Joubert rode by a girl on his bicycle and jabbed a sharp pencil into her back. Monte Ralph Rissell, who raped and murdered five women by age nineteen, shot his cousin with an air gun when he was nine years old. When Ted Bundy was three years old, his fifteen-year-old aunt awoke one morning to find him secretly lifting up her bedcovers and placing three butcher knives beside her. As an adult, Bundy began sabotaging women’s cars without any clear plan of what he would do if he succeeded in trapping a woman by those means.

The stage at which an individual begins to project his fantasy into the real world and involve other people in it is the fundamental difference between the fantasies that you and I as children spin out in our imaginations, tranquil or violent, and those that originate in the mind of the serial killer.

The most common testing out of murder fantasies in childhood involves the torture and killing of animals and bullying of fellow children. The FBI study indicated that 36 percent of subjects displayed cruelty to animals in their childhood, and 46 percent did so by the time they were adolescents; bullying of other children increased from 54 percent to 64 percent from childhood to adolescence.

Accompanying cruelty to animals and bullying, other behavioral traits were reported in the FBI survey as follows: stealing, 56 percent in childhood and 81 percent in adolescence; fire setting, 56 percent and 52 percent; bedwetting, 68 percent and 60 percent; nightmares, 67 percent and 68 percent; and rebelliousness, 67 percent and 84 percent.

Fire setting, cruelty to animals, and bedwetting form a behavioral triad that is most often identified with the childhood histories of serial killers. Most psychiatrists agree that the appearance of all three behaviors in a child signals a high likelihood of a future violent adult.

The commission of lesser crimes, such as breaking and entering, arson, voyeurism, and exhibitionism, is also a common trait in the histories of serial killers. Fetish theft—of women’s underwear from clotheslines, or shoes during burglaries—are sometimes seen in the childhood records of serial killers. Jerry Brudos, for example, was obsessed with women’s shoes, and even stole his teacher’s shoes as a schoolboy. Twenty years later as an adult, he hacked off the foot of one of his victims and kept it in his freezer, slipped into one of his favorite high-heeled shoes. The Brudos case illustrates an important lesson: Ostensibly harmless or “comical” offenses, such as stealing women’s shoes or underwear from a laundry, should not be dismissed without additional attention, especially if the offender is young. Such offenses may seem innocuous on the surface, but in murkier depths they can harbor homicidal roots. It is remarkable how many serial killers have records, some going back decades before they first killed, of minor sexual offenses such as window peeping or exhibitionism. While most minor sexual offenders do not go on to kill, most serial killers do begin with minor offenses. These offenses are often testing probes of fantasy into the realm of reality. If the individual escapes detection or avoids sanction for these offenses, especially at a young age, he can develop a sense of invincibility that carries him to the ultimate deadly peak of his fantasy. One murderer in the FBI study (probably Ed Kemper) easily made the connection between fantasy and homicide, explaining that “Murder is very real. It’s not something you see in a movie. You have to do all the practical things of surviving.”
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Unfortunately fantasy and reality rarely come together, and the serial killer is often frustrated in his attempts to perfectly bring his frequently dwelled-upon fantasy into actuality. When disappointed in the results of his attempt to realize his fantasy exactly as imagined, the killer murders again and again, searching to perfect his desperate attempts to consummate his ideal fantasy. In many ways, serial murder is a learning experience from beginning to end.

Some serial killers, when they actually succeed in realizing their fantasy, stop killing. Ed Kemper’s deepest fantasy was to kill his mother, and when he finally did that, after killing one more woman, he turned himself in. It appears that Andrew Cunanan’s fantasy was to kill a famous person, with Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, and Gianni Versace on his list. Having killed Versace, and no doubt found it unsatisfying, Cunanan saw no point in continuing to pursue his fantasy and shot himself.

Other serial killers, however, once they find the key to acting out their deepest fantasy, continue murdering to repeat the fantasy—they “level out” and begin practicing a perfected ritualistic routine in their homicides, from which they try never to waver and which always leaves them wanting more. Other killers become bored with their fantasy once they have actualized it, and they escalate to more elaborate or violent fantasies in an addictive search of a more intensive “high.”

The serial killer’s personality is a complex cocktail of biological, environmental, and social circumstances. There is no one clear formula for the making of a serial killer. Some children in traumatic circumstances resort to humorous fantasy and become great comedians; some escape by weaving fantastic stories and grow up to be great writers; others illustrate their fantasies and become painters; others become architects, businessmen, lawyers, politicians, and generals (where in some cases they are given medals and honors for killing in numbers that far exceed any serial killer’s body count, a cynic may respond). It is remarkable how many successful individuals can have as traumatic a childhood as serial killers do. But just to complicate such distinctions, one should not overlook the fact that some serial killers are ostensibly successful. John Wayne Gacy, who murdered thirty-three young males, was a construction contractor respected in his community who earned more than $100,000 a year. Ted Bundy was a university graduate and was admitted into law school. Christopher Wilder of Florida, who raped and murdered twelve women, was the owner of two construction companies, an amateur racecar driver, and a substantial contributor to the Seal Rescue Fund and Save the Whales. Richard Cottingham, the Times Square Torso Ripper, was a valued computer data specialist at Blue Cross in New York. Gary Heidnik, who kept female slaves shackled in a fetid basement pit (and upon whom the character of Buffalo Bill in
The Silence of the Lambs
was partially based), was a financial wizard who parlayed a small investment into a fortune. He owned several expensive cars, including a Rolls-Royce, and founded his own church in order to avoid paying taxes. Despite his wealth, he chose to live in North Philadelphia’s ghetto in a rundown home where he kept, tortured, raped, and killed his slaves.
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In each of these cases, the killers’ fantasies were bigger than any achievement in their life.

The key to the making of serial killers lies in the nature of their fantasy and how they actualize it. FBI agents who interviewed convicted serial killers for their study remarked that the one thing that the murderers had difficulty talking about was their childhood fantasies. Somewhere in that dark territory lurks the killer seed. The FBI reported:

Interviews with the murderers in our study revealed that their internal world is filled with troublesome, joyless thoughts of dominance over others. These thoughts are expressed through a wide range of actions toward others. In childhood, these include cruelty to animals, abuse of other children, destructive play patterns, disregard for others, fire setting, stealing, and destroying property. In adolescence and adulthood, the murderers’ actions become more violent: assaultive behaviors, burglary, arson, abduction, rape, nonsexual murder, and finally sexual murder, involving rape, torture, mutilation, and necrophilia.
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Ed Kemper said, “I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that. The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate.”

SEVEN
THE SERIAL MURDERER’S FIRST KILL:
Triggers, Facilitators, Detective Magazines, Paraphilic Hard Porn, and the Bible

You just felt very good after you did it. It just happens to be satisfying, to get the source of blood . . .
—
DAVID BERKOWITZ
, Son of Sam
The psychic abolition of redemption.
—
IAN BRADY
, Moors Murderer

No murder is as critical in the career of any serial killer as the first. Without it, they would not exist. Many already have criminal records for petty crimes or serious violent offenses—some have no criminal records at all. Up until now, although they may have thought about it, they have killed nobody. But something nudges them forward to cross that final horrific line.

The previous chapter outlined how it is believed that the mind of a serial killer, through a combination of environmental factors, parenting, and biological and genetic predisposition, can be thrust into a pattern of often violent fantasies and obsessive thoughts that the serial killer has difficulties separating from reality.

At a certain point in his adolescence or adulthood, the future serial killer begins taking these fantasies out on “test runs.” Once these attempts to involve others in his fantasy start, it will be only a matter of time before the first kill takes place—an important milestone in the history of any serial killer.

Serial Killers’ Reminiscences on Their First Murder

Virtually all serial killers talk about how difficult their first murder was, and how much easier it all became afterward. Henry Lee Lucas remembers committing his first murder when he was fifteen years old. He snatched a seventeen-year-old girl at a bus stop, carried her up an embankment, and attempted to rape her. When she resisted, he strangled her. Her murder was solved only thirty-three years later when Lucas confessed:

I had no intention of killing her. I don’t know whether I was just being afraid somebody was going to catch me or what. That killing was my first, my worst, and the hardest to get over . . . I would go out sometimes for days, and just every time I turned around I’d see police behind me. Then I’d be always looking behind me and watching. Everywhere I’d go I have to be watching for police and be afraid they were going to stop me and pick me up. But they never did bother with me.
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Speaking in the third person, as he often did when being questioned about his crimes, Ted Bundy described his first attempted murder: