The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (86 page)

his next intended target managed to escape by leaping On May 15, 1974, Erno Soto was arrested after

from his moving car. She offered homicide detectives a bungling the abduction of a nine-year-old Puerto Rican description and assisted in the preparation of a widely boy, being surrounded by neighbors and held for police published sketch, but officers appeared no closer to after the child escaped his clutches. In custody, he con-their suspect than they were in 1983.

fessed to the Cropper slaying, but “Charlie Chopoff’s”

Rebounding from his recent failure with another kill, sole surviving victim refused to pick Soto out of a the slayer dumped Gail Ficklin’s body in Los Angeles on lineup, saying only that the suspect’s appearance was August 15. A 12-week lull was broken on November 6

“similar.” Officials at Manhattan State Hospital ini-with Gayle Rouselle’s murder in Gardena, and the killer tially provided an alibi, stating that Soto had been con-returned the next day to slaughter Myrtle Collier in fined on the date of Cropper’s slaying, but they later L.A. Nesia McElrath, 23, was found slain on December admitted that he sometimes slipped away from the facil-19, and Elizabeth Landcraft’s mutilated corpse was ity, unnoticed. Found to be insane, the suspect was found on December 22, 1985. The day after Christmas, returned to the hospital under closer guard, the Gidget Castro’s body was discarded in the City of Com-

“unsolved” murders terminating after he was locked merce.

away. Tagged with the pseudonym of “Miguel Rivera”

The new year was five days old when Tammy

when author Barbara Gelb described his case in On the Scretchings met her killer in Los Angeles, becoming Track of Murder (1975), Soto continues to confound number 14 on the Southside Slayer’s hit parade. On some authors who report his crimes under the false January 10, a 27-year-old prostitute was beaten and a name, instead of his own.

male acquaintance stabbed when he attempted to See also RANES, DANNY and LARRY

restrain her violent customer. Their physical descriptions of the suspect tallied with reports from the survivor who escaped in August 1985.

“SOUTHSIDE Slayer”

The killer chalked up number 16, Lorna Reed, on Unidentified at this writing, the “Southside Slayer” of February 11, 1986, discarding her corpse at San Dimas, Los Angeles is credited with at least 14 homicides 25 miles east of his usual hunting ground. Prostitute between September 1983 and May 1987. At least three Verna Williams was found on May 26, her body

other victims are considered possible additions to the slumped in the stairwell of a Los Angeles elementary list, and three more managed to survive encounters with school, and Trina Chaney joined the list November 3, the stalker, offering police descriptions of a black man in in Watts. In January 1988, police announced that Car-his early thirties, sporting a mustache and baseball cap.

olyn Barney—killed May 29, 1987—was being added The killer’s chosen victims have been women, mostly to the Southside list.

black and mainly prostitutes, tortured with superficial Three other victims have been unofficially connected cuts before they were strangled or stabbed to death in a to the Southside Slayer, though detectives hesitate to grisly “pattern of overkill,” their bodies dumped on res-make a positive I.D. Loretta Jones, a 22-year-old coed idential streets, in alleyways, and in schoolyards.

with no criminal record, was murdered and dumped in Loletha Prevot was the killer’s first known victim, a Los Angeles alley on April 15, 1986. A white “Jane found dead in Los Angeles on September 4, 1983. Four Doe,” age 25 to 30, was discovered strangled in a months passed before the killer struck again, on New garbage dumpster three weeks later. Finally, Canoscha Year’s Day, dumping the corpse of Patricia Coleman in Griffin, 22, was stabbed to death on the grounds of a Inglewood. Another 10 months slipped away before local high school, her body discovered on July 24.

discovery of a third victim, Sheila Burton—alias Bur-By early 1988, police were backing off their initial ris—on November 18, 1984.

body count, noting that defendant Charles Mosley had The elusive slayer adopted a regular schedule in been convicted in one of the 1986 murders, while five 1985, beginning with the murder of Frankie Bell on more cases—involving victims Barney, Burris, Castro,
247

“SPREE Murder”

Ficklin, and McElrath—were considered “closed” with in a shootout with police. The authors tell us that the arrest of two other serial slayers, Louis Craine and

“Wilder’s classification changed from serial to spree Daniel Siebert. Los Angeles police were less fortunate because of the multiple murders and the lack of a cool-with their hasty arrest of an African-American L.A.

ing-off period during his prolonged murder event, County sheriff’s deputy, Rickey Ross, as a suspect in the which lasted nearly seven weeks.” Four years later in Southside case, when ballistics tests on the officer’s pis-Whoever Fights Monsters
(1992), Ressler further con-tol cleared him of involvement in the crimes. The case fused the issue by describing Richard Speck’s massacre remains unsolved today.

of eight student nurses in their shared living quarters as a spree murder (corrected in the paperback edition to read “mass murder”).

“SPREE Murder”:
Defined

Ultimately, such refinement of a term to the nth A prime example of FBI taxonomy refined to the point degree without defining the critical time spans involved of inadvertent chaos, the term
spree murder
needlessly or making allowance for individual cases, appears to complicates classification of multiple homicides.

serve no useful purpose. For that reason, as elsewhere According to the Bureau’s
Crime Classification Manual
explained, this book follows the definition of “serial (1992), there are six kinds of murder: single, double, murder” published by the National Institute of Justice triple, mass, spree, and serial. The first three are self-in 1988, and disregards the “spree murder” classifica-explanatory, based on the number of victims killed at tion as superfluous.

one time and place, while “MASS MURDER” involves the
See also
HISTORY OF SERIAL MURDER

death of four or more victims. “SERIAL MURDER” logically involves the killing of successive victims over time—that is,
in series
—but FBI publicists could not
SPREITZER, Edward

See
“CHICAGO RIPPERS”

resist adding a sixth category, which remains the topic of endless debate.

As defined by the Bureau, spree murder involves “a
STANIAK, Lucian

single event with two or more locations and no emo-As a young man in Warsaw, Staniak lost his parents and tional cooling-off period between murders.” The sister in a tragic automobile accident. The driver example cited is that of Howard Unruh, who in 1949

responsible—a young Polish Air Force captain’s wife—

killed 13 victims in the space of 20 minutes, ambling was cleared of criminal responsibility, but Staniak through his neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey, remained obsessed with “justice” in the case, and over shooting passers-by at random. Most criminologists time he hatched a scheme to punish young blond regard Unruh as a
mass
murderer, based on the short women everywhere in Poland. He launched his cam-time span and number of victims, but the FBI dis-paign in 1964 with a letter to the Polish state newspa-agrees—illogically, it seems—based solely on the fact of per. Writing in red ink with a peculiar style that earned his mobility.

him the nickname of the “Red Spider,” Staniak warned: Unfortunately, the FBI has not defined the requisite

“There is no happiness without tears, no life without distance between murder scenes that shifts a bloodbath death. Beware! I am going to make you cry.”

from mass to spree murder. Is it enough to have the killer Employed as a translator for the official state pub-run next door, or must he go around the block? Like-lishing house, Staniak traveled widely in his profession, wise, the elusive cooling-off period remains undefined chalking up an estimated 20 female victims in the next and wholly subjective. How long must a slayer cool off two years. The first, a 17-year-old student, was raped between murders to graduate from spree to serial killing?

and mutilated at Olsztyn on the anniversary of Polish One author proposes a minimum of 30 days between liberation from Nazi occupation. The next day, one of murders, without regard to the individual killer’s state of Staniak’s trademark letters declared, “I picked a juicy mind, but such arbitrary deadlines are clearly absurd.

flower in Olsztyn and I shall do it again somewhere Our difficulty is further compounded when FBI

else, for there is no holiday without a funeral.”

Agents ROBERT RESSLER and JOHN DOUGLAS state in His next holiday victim was a blond 16-year-old who their book
Sexual Homicide
(1988) that a bona fide ser-marched at the head of a student’s parade on the day ial killer may switch to spree murders—and, presum-she died. An anonymous letter directed police to the ably, back again—depending on his mood. They cite the body—ravaged, with a spike run through the genitals—

case of CHRISTOPHER WILDER, acknowledged by the FBI in a factory basement not far from her home.

as a serial killer in Florida before he was publicly identiOn All Saints’ Day, Staniak murdered a blond hotel fied in 1984, at which point he “went on a long-term receptionist, mutilating her body with a screwdriver. Next killing spree throughout the country,” ultimately dying day, he wrote the press that “Only tears of sorrow can
248

STANO, Gerald Eugene

wash out the stain of shame; only pangs of suffering can blot out the fires of lust.” On May Day 1966, he raped and disemboweled a 17-year-old, dumping her body in a toolshed behind her home. Police were looking into 14

other cases when the killer left another victim raped and mutilated on a train that Christmas Eve. His letter to the press was simple and direct: “I have done it again.”

An artist of sorts, Staniak was finally traced by police in 1967 after he slaughtered a fellow member of the Art Lovers Club. Police became suspicious when they viewed his paintings—mainly crimson, daubed on with a knife and focusing on scenes of mutilation—and they found that Staniak’s itinerary for the past two years precisely coincided with the string of unsolved crimes. Arrested on the way home from his final murder, committed in a peevish bid for more publicity, Staniak readily confessed to 20 slayings and was sent to an asylum in Katowice for life.

STANO, Gerald Eugene

A native of Daytona Beach, Florida, born in 1951 and adopted as an infant, Stano suffered persistent learning and “adjustment” problems in his early school years, complicated by a lack of coordination that resulted in frequent falls. After several years in a Virginia military academy, he graduated from high school in Daytona Beach and went to work at his adoptive father’s gas station, also holding jobs as a cook and waiter on the side.

Gerald Stano (Author’s collection)

He met a lot of women, but they universally rejected him, increasing Stano’s deep resentment toward a world of “bitches.” Sometimes they laughed at him, but Stano also recalled that some “pulled my hair” or “threw beer Stano launched into a marathon confession, directing bottles at me.” Years later, after killing 41 women, Florida police to the buried remains of 24 identifiable Stano would confide to homicide detectives that “I hate victims and two skeletal “Jane Does.” By December a bitchy chick.”

1983, Stano had provided details of 41 murders, According to his own confession, Stano claimed his though none of the cases from Pennsylvania or New first two victims in New Jersey during 1969. He drifted Jersey were ever prosecuted. Even in Florida, with 27

into Pennsylvania in the early 1970s and murdered a corpses recovered, Stano faced trial in only a handful half-dozen women there before returning to his native of cases. Life sentences were meted out for the murders Florida, launching a one-man crime wave that would of 17-year-old Barbara Bauer, kidnapped from Smyrna claim another 33 lives between 1973 and 1980.

Beach and killed on September 6, 1973; 24-year-old Devoted to the hunt, Stano preyed chiefly on prosti-Nancy Heard, found dead near Ormond Beach on Jan-tutes and hitchhikers, though one of his victims would uary 3, 1975; 20-year-old Mary Maher, a coed stabbed be a high school cheerleader. They ranged in age from to death in Daytona Beach on January 10, 1980; and 13 to the mid-30s, dispatched by means of gunshots, 26-year-old Toni Van Haddocks, found at Holly Hill knives, and strangulation. None were apparently on February 15, 1980, with 51 stab wounds. Separate raped, and state psychiatrists concluded that Stano death sentences were imposed on Stano for the mur-drew his basic satisfaction from the simple act of murders of 17-year-old Cathy Scharf, abducted from Port der. As one detective summed the killer up, “He thinks Orange and killed on December 17, 1973; 24-year-old about three things: stereo systems, cars, and killing Susan Bickrest, strangled and drowned in Spruce Creek women.”