The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (56 page)

mother. Various accounts agree that he was dominated Convicted by the Intermediate People’s Court on by his girlfriend almost from the moment of their meet-charges of murder, rape, and robbery, Li was sentenced ing, but his mother kept her hand in, too, the females in to death on December 18, 1996.

his life apparently cooperating rather than competing.

Long enlisted in the army prior to marriage, and he crashed a motorcycle six months later, shattering his hel-

“LINKAGE Blindness”:
Law enforcement problem met with the impact of his skull on asphalt. Convalesc-A phrase coined by Dr. Steven Egger in 1984, “linkage ing in the hospital, he was alternately stricken by blindness” describes the frequent inability (or deliberate blinding headaches and unpredictable violent rages, and refusal) of some police departments to recognize links he discovered a new obsession with sex. While still in a between the several crimes committed by a serial killer cast, Long masturbated five times a day to relieve him-at large. The problem is exacerbated by nomadic killers self, continuing the practice at home despite twice-daily who cross jurisdictional lines and by the often bitter rivalry between law enforcement agencies. (In Los Angeles, for instance, relations between the city police and county sheriff’s office were so strained that the local FBI field office maintained duplicate teams to investigate bank robberies, one each for coordination with LAPD and the sheriff’s department.) That rivalry intensifies in jurisdictions where state or local police are at odds with the FBI over prior conflicts, and some departments withhold cooperation from federal programs such as VICAP. Sadly, the net result of such squabbling is seen in the handiwork of criminals who might be apprehended earlier if all concerned in tracking them were able to cooperate.

LONG, Robert Joe

A distant cousin of HENRY LUCAS on his mother’s side, born October 14, 1953, at Kenova, West Virginia, Long may be the classic case of someone “destined” to become a serial killer. With other members of his family, he suffered from a genetic disorder characterized by an extra X chromosome, causing his glands to produce abnormal amounts of estrogen in puberty, with the result that his breasts began to enlarge. Surgery removed six pounds of excess tissue from his chest, but the resultant gender confusion remained, perhaps exacerbated by his mother, who shared Long’s bed until he reached age 13. (Long’s mother, twice divorced, denies his allegations that he watched her entertain numerous male “visitors” in their one-room apartment.)

Aside from genetic and family problems, Long also suffered a series of grievous head injuries beginning at Robert Joe Long (Wide World API)

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intercourse with his wife. Still it was not enough, and money from the school, his flight allegedly precipitated soon he began to search for prey.

by a teacher’s sexual advances.

Between 1980 and 1983, Long terrorized the com-Six years passed before the future “Monster of the munities of Miami, Ocala, and Fort Lauderdale as the Andes” left another mark on public records, this time

“Classified Ad Rapist,” answering “For Sale” ads in charged and sent to prison for theft of an automobile.

newspapers and in midday attacks preying on house-On his second day behind bars, 18-year-old Pedro was wives who had placed them. Dropping by while their gang-raped by four older inmates, a risk run by young husbands were working, Long typically pulled a knife, men in jails the world over. Instead of reporting the bound his victims, raped them violently, and robbed crime, López fashioned himself a crude knife and went their homes before he fled. Convicted of rape in out for revenge, killing three of his assailants in the next November 1981, Long was cleared on appeal through two weeks. Authorities described the homicides as self-discovery of “witnesses” alleging the victim’s consent, defense and tacked a token two years onto Pedro’s sen-and so the attacks continued, with murder shortly tence.

added to his list of crimes.

On release from prison, López started stalking young Unlike the 50 women raped by Long, his murder vic-girls with a vengeance; by 1978 the killer estimated he tims were selected from the ranks of prostitutes, nude had raped and slain at least 100 in Peru. His specialty dancers, or other women whom he viewed as “tramps.”

appeared to be abducting children from Indian tribes, Between May and November 1984, he strangled,

but the technique backfired when he was captured by a stabbed, and shot at least nine victims, with a 10th sus-group of Ayachucos in northern Peru while attempting pected by police but never charged against him. In early to kidnap a nine-year-old girl. López was beaten by his November, he snatched a 17-year-old girl off the Street captors, stripped, and tortured. The Ayachucos were and raped her, sparing her life out of pity when she about to bury him alive when a female American mis-described acts of incest performed by her father. In sionary intervened, convincing Pedro’s captors that they releasing a victim capable of describing him and his car, should deliver him to the police. They grudgingly Long sealed his own fate, but police were too slow to agreed and López was deported within days, Peruvian save victim Kim Swann, murdered two days later in a authorities declining to waste valuable time on Indian final frenzy.

complaints.

Arrested on November 17, 1984, Long was charged Once more at liberty, López began traveling widely with nine counts of first-degree murder plus felony in Colombia and Ecuador, selecting victims with counts of abduction, rape, and sexual assault on his impunity. A sudden rash of missing girls in three adja-surviving victim. Convicted at trial in early 1985, he cent nations was ascribed to the activity of slavery or was sentenced to die and remains on death row at this prostitution rings, but the authorities had no firm evi-writing, still awaiting execution.

dence and no suspects. The case broke in April 1980

when a flash flood near Ambato, Ecuador, uncovered bodies of four missing children. Days later, Carvina
LOTTI, Giancarlo

See
“MONSTER OF FLORENCE”

Poveda observed López leaving the Plaza Rosa marketplace with her 12-year-old daughter. Summoning help, she pursued him and López was captured by townspeo-LÓPEZ, Pedro Alonzo

ple and held for police who began to suspect that they Pedro López was the seventh child of 13, born in might have a madman in custody.

squalor to a prostitute in the village of Tolima, Colom-In the face of Pedro’s stubborn silence, police tried a bia. Exiled from the family hovel at age eight after his new stratagem. Dressing a priest, Father Córdoba mother caught him fondling a younger sister, Pedro Gudino, in prison garb, they placed him in a cell with was picked off the street by a pedophile who offered López, leaving Gudino to win the suspect’s confidence, him food and a place to stay. Instead, the boy was swapping stories of real or imagined crimes late into the taken to a derelict building and raped, a trauma that night. At length, when the padre had heard enough, apparently did irreparable damage to his already López was confronted with the evidence of his own twisted psyche.

admissions and he broke down, making a full confes-Homeless, terrified of strangers, Pedro slept in alleys sion. Liaison with authorities in Peru and Colombia and empty market stalls, drifting from town to town substantiated parts of the prisoner’s grisly, almost and living hand-to-mouth on the streets. In Bogotá, an incredible story.

American family took López in, providing him with free According to Pedro’s best estimate, he had murdered room and board and enrolling him in a day school for at least 110 girls in Ecuador, perhaps 100 in Colombia, orphans. At age 12, Pedro ran away after stealing and “many more than 100” in Peru. “I like the girls in
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LUCAS, Henry Lee

Ecuador,” he told police. “They are more gentle and encounter with a freight train—dragged himself around trusting. They are not as suspicious of strangers as the house and tried to drown his personal humiliation Colombian girls.”

in a nonstop flow of liquor.

In the course of his confessions, López made an The Lucas brood consisted of nine children, but sev-effort to invest his crimes with philosophical trappings.

eral were farmed out to relatives, institutions, and fos-

“I lost my innocence at age eight,” he told interrogater homes over the years. Henry was one of those tors, “so I decided to do the same to as many young

“lucky” enough to remain with his parents, and Viola girls as I could.” Trolling village markets for selected appears to have hated him from the moment of birth, targets with “a certain look of innocence,” López first seizing every opportunity to make his life a hell on raped his victims, then stared into their eyes as he stran-earth. Both Anderson and Henry were the targets of her gled them, deriving sadistic pleasure from watching violent outbursts, man and boy alike enduring wicked them die. Hunting by daylight, so darkness could not beatings, forced to witness the parade of strangers who hide their death throes, López allegedly sought out one shared Viola’s bed. Sickened by one such episode, victim immediately after another, his bloodlust becom-Anderson Lucas dragged himself outside to spend a ing insatiable over time.

night in the snow, there contracting a fatal case of pneu-Police were initially skeptical of their suspect’s monia.

grandiose claims, but doubts evaporated after López led Henry survived, after a fashion, but his mother’s cru-detectives to 53 graves in the vicinity of Ambato, stand-elty knew no restraint. When Lucas entered school in ing by in chains as they unearthed the remains of girls 1943, she curled his stringy hair in ringlets, dressed him aged eight to 12. At 28 other sites, searchers came up as a girl, and sent him off to class that way. Barefoot empty in the wake of raids by predatory animals, but until a kindly teacher bought him shoes, Henry was the police were now convinced. Originally charged with beaten at home for accepting the gift. If Henry found a 53 murders, López saw the ante boosted to 110 as a pet, his mother killed it, and he came to understand that result of his detailed confessions. As Major Victor Las-life—like sex—was cheap. When Henry’s eye was

cano, director of the Ambato prison, explained: “If gashed, reportedly while playing with a knife, Viola let someone confesses to fifty-three you find and hundreds it fester until doctors had to surgically remove the with-more you don’t, you tend to believe what he says.” Las-ered orb, replacing it with glass. On one occasion, after cano also told reporters that “I think his estimate of he was beaten with a piece of lumber, Henry lay semi-300 is very low, because in the beginning he cooperated conscious for three days before Viola’s live-in lover, with us and took us each day to three or four hidden

“Uncle Bernie,” took him to a hospital for treatment.

corpses. But then he tired, changed his mind, and Bernie also introduced the boy to bestiality, teaching stopped helping.”

Henry to kill various animals after they were raped and The change of heart came too late to let the “Mon-tortured. At age 15, anxious to try sex with a human ster of the Andes” off the hook. Convicted on 57 mur-being, Lucas picked up a girl near Lynchburg, strangled der counts in Ecuador, López was sentenced to life her when she resisted his clumsy advances, and buried imprisonment—a penalty that normally amounts to 16

her corpse in the woods near Harrisburg, Virginia.

years in custody, since consecutive terms are forbidden (The March 1951 disappearance of 17-year-old Laura by law. Few observers believed that parole would ever Burnley would remain unsolved for three decades until liberate the man billed by the
Guinness Book of World
Lucas confessed the murder in 1983.)

Records
as the world’s most prolific serial killer, but jus-In June 1954, a series of burglaries around Rich-tice was blind. Authorities released López in 1996 and mond earned Lucas a six-year prison term. He walked deported him to Colombia. He is presumed to be at away from a road gang on September 14, 1957, and large today, living under a pseudonym.

authorities tracked him to his sister’s home in Tecumseh, Michigan, three months later. A second escape attempt, in December 1957, saw Lucas recaptured the
LUCAS, Henry Lee

same day, and he was discharged from prison on Sep-America’s most controversial murderer was born tember 2, 1959.

August 23, 1936, at Blacksburg, Virginia. The Lucas Back in Tecumseh, Henry was furious when his 74-family home was a two-room dirt-floor cabin in the year-old mother turned up on his doorstep, nagging woods outside of town, where Henry’s alcoholic par-him incessantly with her demands that he return to ents brewed bootleg whiskey, his mother doing occa-Blacksburg. Both of them were drinking on the night of sional turns as the neighborhood prostitute. Viola January 11, 1960, when she struck him with a broom Lucas ran her family with an iron hand, while husband and Henry struck back with a knife, leaving her dead Anderson—dubbed “No Legs” after his drunken

on the floor. Arrested five days later in Toledo, Ohio,
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