The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (9 page)

“BLACK Widows”

cruel mistreatment. Charging the prisoners with five counts of murder, Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter Pitchess announced that Bittaker and Norris might be linked to the disappearance of 30 or 40 more victims.

By February 20, the stack of confiscated photographs had yielded 19 missing girls, but none were ever traced, and Norris had apparently exhausted his desire to talk.

On March 18, Norris pled guilty on five counts of murder, turning state’s evidence against his confederate.

In return for his cooperation, he received a sentence of 45 years to life, with parole possible in the year 2010.

Bittaker, meanwhile—nicknamed “Pliers,” for his favorite instrument of torture—denied everything. At his trial, on February 5, 1981, he testified that Roy Norris first informed him of the murders after their arrest in 1979. A jury chose not to believe him, returning a guilty verdict on February 17. On March 24, in accordance with the jury’s recommendation, Bittaker was sentenced to die. The judge also imposed an alternate sentence of 199 years and four months in prison, to take effect in the event that Bittaker’s death sentence is ever commuted on appeal.

“BLACK Widows”:
Female serial-killer type Borrowed from the venomous spider that devours its mate after sex, this label is applied in criminology to female murderers who prey on their own husbands, relatives, or lovers. Monetary gain, through life insurance or inheritance, is frequently a motive in such Louise Peete was a classic black widow, motivated by crimes, although it may not be the only motive.

profit. (Author’s collection)

NANNY

DOSS, according to her own confession, killed successive husbands in search of true romance, as she had seen that state of bliss portrayed in women’s maga-dismembered her victims, while Velma Barfield set one zines. When mothers kill their children—most particu-of her husbands on fire as he slept. In Texas, Betty Beets larly when the victims’ lives are not insured—there is preferred to make her husbands disappear entirely, clearly some psychological motive for the crimes.

waiting for a legal declaration of death to free up life South African Daisy De Melker murdered her stepchil-insurance benefits.

dren in a misguided effort to gain more attention from Black widows, finally, for all the ink and paper her husband. Other maternal child killers, like MARY-spent describing their murders as “quiet” and “gen-BETH TINNING, apparently suffer from MUNCHAUSEN’S

tle,” rank among the most cold-blooded killers on SYNDROME BY PROXY—essentially a pathological crav-record. The very calculation of their crimes may help ing for the attention and sympathy they receive during explain why three of the four women executed in tragic times.

America since 1976 are ranked in this category. Others Like their web-spinning namesake, black widows are presently sentenced to death in North Carolina frequently use poison to dispatch their mates and par-and Texas.

ents, siblings, and assorted other relatives. Where chil-See also
“BLUEBEARD” KILLERS; MODUS OPERANDI; dren are concerned, asphyxiation is a killing method MOTIVES; WEAPONS

favored by the “gentle” sex. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Gunshot wounds defy classification as death from natural causes, but a shooting may be

“BLUEBEARD” Killers:
Male serial-killer type staged to look like suicide or accidental death, a tactic A generic term for any man who murders a series of favored by Barbara Stager in North Carolina. Burly wives or fiancées, this subgroup of serial murder ironi-BELLE GUNNESS not only bludgeoned, but sometimes cally derives its popular nickname from a 15th-century
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BOLBER-PETRILLO-FAVATO Murder Ring

slayer of children. French nobleman GILLES DE RAIS was rule out any sexual or psychological motive in such the original “Bluebeard,” so called after the blue-black cases, however. Prolific Bluebeard Harry Powers told color of his facial hair, but any link between this kind of authorities in West Virginia that watching victims die in murder and sadistic pedophilia has long since been lost.

his homemade gas chamber “beat any cat house I was Years after Gilles was executed, a popular folk tale ever in.” Another American Bluebeard who murdered at hung the nickname on the fictional Chevalier Raoul, least seven wives, James Watson, was discovered on whose seventh wife found the corpses of her six mur-arrest to be a hermaphrodite (possessing both male and dered predecessors in a room her husband forbade her female genitalia). We can only imagine what impact the to enter.

deformity had on his numerous wedding nights, but it Most real-life Bluebeards, in the mold of JOHANN

surely distorted his outlook on women and sex.

HOCH and HENRI LANDRU, woo and slay their female vic-See also “BLACK WIDOWS”; MOTIVES

tims in pursuit of some material reward, such as inheritance or life insurance. Frequently, they practice bigamy and fraud, along with other mercenary crimes, before
BOLBER-PETRILLO-FAVATO Murder Ring

they ultimately find the nerve to kill. It would be rash to America’s most prolific team of killers-for-profit were active in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the 1930s, claiming an estimated 30 to 50 victims before the ring’s various members were apprehended. Students of the case, in retrospect, are prone to cite the gang’s activities as evidence that modern homicide statistics may be woefully inaccurate. If 20,000 murders are reported in a given year, they say, it is entirely possible that 20,000

more go unreported, overlooked by the authorities.

The basic murder method was conceived in 1932, by Dr. Morris Bolber and his good friend, Paul Petrillo.

After one of Bolber’s female patients aired complaints about her husband’s infidelity, the doctor and Petrillo planned for Paul to woo the lonely lady, gaining her cooperation in a plan to kill her wayward spouse and split $10,000 in insurance benefits. The victim, Anthony Giscobbe, was a heavy drinker, and it proved a simple matter for his wife to strip him as he lay unconscious, leaving him beside an open window in the dead of winter while he caught his death of cold. The grieving widow split her cash with Bolber and Petrillo, whereupon her “lover” promptly went in search of other restless, greedy wives.

It soon became apparent that Italian husbands, caught up in the middle of the Great Depression, carried little life insurance on themselves. Petrillo called upon his cousin Herman, an accomplished local actor, to impersonate potential victims and apply for heavy policies. Once several payments had been made, the husbands were eliminated swiftly and efficiently through “accidents” or “natural causes.” Dr. Bolber’s favorite methods included poison and blows to the head with a sandbag, producing cerebral hemorrhage, but methods were varied to fit circumstances. One victim, a roofer named Lorenzo, was hurled to his death from an eight-story building, the Petrillo cousins first handing him some French postcards to explain his careless distraction.

After roughly a dozen murders, the gang recruited Gilles de Rais, the original “Bluebeard” (Author’s collection) local faith healer Carino Favato, known as the Witch in
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BOMBING and Serial Murder

her home neighborhood. Favato had dispatched three of her own husbands before going into business full-time as a “marriage consultant,” poisoning unwanted husbands for a fee. Impressed by Dr. Bolber’s explanation of the life insurance scam, Favato came on board and brought the gang a list of her prospective clients. By the latter part of 1937, Bolber’s ring had polished off an estimated 50 victims, at least 30 of whom were fairly well documented by subsequent investigation.

The roof fell in when an ex-convict approached Herman Petrillo, pushing a new get-rich scheme.

Unimpressed, Petrillo countered with a pitch for his acquaintance to secure potential murder victims, and the felon panicked, running to police. As members of the gang were rounded up, they “squealed” on one another in the hope of finding leniency, their clients chiming in as ripples spread throughout a stunned community. While several wives were sent to prison, most escaped by testifying for the state. The two Petrillos were condemned and put to death, while Dr.

Bolber and Carino Favato each drew terms of life imprisonment.

BOMBING and Serial Murder

A favorite tool of terrorists since the mid-19th century, bombs are built and detonated for all the same reasons that people set fires. On an individual basis, serial bombing is less common than serial ARSON, but several striking cases have been logged in modern times. “Mad Bomber” George Metesky operated in New York through the late 1940s and early 1950s, nursing an explosive grudge against the corporation (and one-time employer) he blamed for infecting him with tuberculosis. More recently, “Unabomber”

Theodore Kaczynski—once dubbed the “scariest

criminal in America” by
Playboy
magazine—detonated 16 bombs in eight states between May 1978

and April 1995, killing three persons and wounding

“Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski being escorted to court at least 20 others.

(Wide World API)

As with any other serial crime, the MOTIVES in repeated bombings may vary over time, from one incident to the next. Walter Moody’s first mail bomb, in 1972, was addressed to car dealer who had repossessed
American
spelled backwards—trained its members in his vehicle; 19 years later, he was sentenced to life the art of demolition and was deemed responsible without parole in federal prison for mailing bombs to (though never prosecuted) for more than 100 racist judges and lawyers supportive of black civil rights, bombings in the southern states. A similar, if less well-including two victims who died. Diagnosed as schizo-traveled, clique was the so-called Silver Dollar Group phrenic in 1968, Moody saw high explosives as the that drew its membership from Klansmen in southeast-cure for all the grudges he held against individuals and ern Louisiana and some nearby Mississippi counties.

society at large.

Each member of the group carried a silver dollar minted Extremists of both left and right have made their in the year of his birth, and they specialized in car mark with bombs in recent times. During the 1960s, a bombs, crippling one NAACP leader in 1965 and

splinter faction of the Ku Klux Klan called Nacirema—

killing another in 1967.

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“BOSTON Strangler”

While bombs are used most often in extremist-moti-killed three victims and wounded at least 116 in April vated crimes or criminal enterprise cases (including 1999. Copeland, an outspoken neo-Nazi, targeted attacks by organized crime), there may also be a sexual gays and ethnic minorities with his lethal charges, motive in bombing. The Metesky case presents the first planted at bars and bus stops. Convicted of murder on well-known application of psychological PROFILING, in June 30, 2000, Copeland received six terms of life which Dr. James Brussel divined the offender’s sexual imprisonment.