The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (10 page)

In Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1987 nursing attendant Donald Harvey – a dark-haired, handsome man of thirty-five – was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment after pleading guilty to the murder of twenty-four people in four years.
Most of them were elderly patients at the Daniel Drake memorial hospital in the city, where he worked at the time of his arrest.

Harvey, who was described in press reports as an ‘avowed’ homosexual, was born in a quiet rural community in Kentucky.
There was nothing in his ordinary, family background to suggest unhappiness or deprivation in childhood.
His parents were regular Sunday churchgoers who worked hard all year, farming tobacco.
His teacher remembered Harvey as a ‘very attractive child’ who got on well with everyone.
Reactions were much the same when he went to work in Cincinnati as a young man; at first all his nursing staff colleagues thought him a gentle, cheerful person incapable of harming anyone.

In fact Harvey led a double life for at least four years in Cincinnati.
Outwardly he was a pleasant young man ready to do anyone a good turn: the man no-one knew was a mass murderer who ‘talked about killing so matter-of-factly you’d think he was talking about going to the chemist, or ordering a sandwich’.
He committed his first murder in 1983.
On 10 April that year he baked a pie for elderly, ailing Helen Metzger who lived in the flat upstairs and relied upon good-neighbour Harvey for many favours.
She thought it a typical kindness – but the pie was laced with arsenic, and she died (presumably in agony) soon afterwards.
Murder was not suspected.

During the early 1980s a young man (who knew nothing of Harvey’s double life) moved in to share the apartment.
Whether Harvey saw the young man’s parents as a challenge to his own domination of their son is not known; however, he later confessed to murdering the father, and attempting to murder the mother, by giving them meals poisoned with arsenic.
Again there was no suspicion of foul play.
According to Hamilton County prosecutor Arthur Ney at Harvey’s trial, the Kentucky killer also administered arsenic occasionally to his young flatmate, never enough to kill him, deliberately, but because ‘(Harvey) just wanted to see him suffer from time to time’.

In 1985 Harvey was suspected of stealing body tissues from the Veterans Administration medical centre in Cincinnati, where he had worked since 1976 as a mortuary attendant.
No charges were brought: instead he was allowed to ‘resign’ – and promptly joined the Daniel Drake memorial hospital as a nursing orderly.
As always he made a good first impression.
Even his quips ‘I got another one today’, whenever a patient died in the ward where he was working – something which happened with increasing frequency over the next two years – were accepted as in-jokes for a time: by the time they aroused suspicion, a total of twenty-one patients had been murdered.

On Harvey’s own admission some were poisoned with cyanide, rat poison, arsenic and even hepatitis germs.
He suffocated others by drawing a plastic bag over their heads, or injected air into their veins to cause blood clots ending in heart failure.
In March 1987 a post-mortem on a patient named John Powell, who died suddenly following admission to the Daniel Drake hospital after a road accident, revealed traces of cyanide poison.
Harvey, who refused to take a lie-detector test, later confessed to the one murder.
When a local television station reported that staff at the hospital were concerned about other ‘mystery’ deaths there, he confessed to twenty-four murders (including those of twenty-one patients).
Thanks to plea-bargaining, however, he evaded the death sentence.
Although a list of the twenty-four names was found behind a picture in Harvey’s flat, the victims themselves were buried after first being embalmed – which meant no traces of poison were likely to be found.
Furthermore, there was no eye-witness evidence against him: so that without the confession, the case might have collapsed.
Even so, prosecutor Arthur Ney left the court in no doubt as to his views: ‘He’s no mercy killer, and he’s not insane.
He killed because he
liked
killing.’ That view was supported by Cincinnati psychologist Dr Walt Lippert, who said ‘We expect our killers to look like Frankenstein, [but] it’s all about power.
Donald Harvey could hurt these people – watch them die – and they couldn’t do a thing.’

In 1989 nursing sister Michaela Roeder was charged at Wuppertal, West Germany, with the murder of seventeen patients by injection with Catapresan, a drug which affects high blood pressure.
Public prosecutor Karl-Hermann Majorowsky accused her of playing ‘mistress of life or death’ over patients in the intensive care unit of St Peter’s Hospital in Wuppertal-Barmen, by her random selection of who should live or die.
Twenty-eight bodies were exhumed after a nurse claimed to have seen Sister Roeder injecting a cancer patient with Catapresan.
Seventeen of the corpses were found to contain traces of the drug.
Newspaper reports said that even before suspicion was first aroused, Sister Roeder – who denied the murder charges – had been nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’ by her colleagues, because of the high death rate in the ward.
She was alleged by police to have admitted involvement in six deaths ‘because she could not bear to see patients suffer unnecessarily’.

On 10 April 1989 Dr Alois Stacher – head of Vienna’s hospital system – told a press conference that four women nurses working at the Lainz Hospital had been charged with the multiple murder of patients aged between seventy-three and eighty-two, and a warrant issued for the arrest of a fifth nurse.
He said the ‘bloody murders’, allegedly committed at intervals since 1983, totalled at least forty-nine – probably the largest number of ‘series murders’ in European history.
When first interrogated, said Dr Stacher, the nurses claimed the deaths were ‘mercy killings’.
He disagreed: ‘These nurses enjoyed killing, because it gave them an extraordinary power over life and death.
They killed patients who had become a nuisance to them, who had angered them or who posed a special problem.’

The killing rate rose from one patient every three months to one a month and continued virtually unnoticed – until a chance remark by an off-duty nurse to a ward doctor was reported to Dr Stacher, who immediately called in the police.
The nurses were alleged to have changed their
modus operandi
from time to time, to avoid rousing suspicion.
The method most frequently used was to drown patients by forcing water down their throats whilst holding their nostrils closed.
‘This is a painful death which leaves virtually no trace,’ said Dr Stacher.
‘Water in the lungs of an elderly person is considered quite normal.’ The nurse named as leader of the death group was said to have confessed personally to murdering twenty-two patients in this way.
Other methods allegedly included injection of insulin, glucose and sleeping drugs.
None of the accused had been brought to trial when this book went to press.

One twentieth-century poisoner who appeared to be a straight throwback to the Anna Zwanziger type of serial killer (she regarded arsenic as her ‘truest friend’) was Englishman Graham Young.
Young, who was born in 1947, yearned obsessively for publicity.
His mother died when he was only a few months old, and the solitary, intelligent child grew into an adolescent odd-man-out who disliked society generally and, perversely, transferred his admiration to Hitler and the Nazis.
Another of his early heroes was Dr William Palmer, the English multiple murderer who poisoned his creditors and probably his wife, his mother-in-law, and four of his children before he was hanged in the 1850s.

Graham Young began experimenting with poison in 1961 – when he was fourteen – by administering small doses of antimony tartrate to his family.
His elder sister Winifred suffered considerably from what she thought to be a permanently upset stomach.
In April 1962 Graham Young’s stepmother died.
When his father, who was also ill and growing steadily weaker, was taken to hospital the doctors diagnosed arsenic poisoning.
Fifteen-year-old Graham Young was outraged.
His comment ‘How ridiculous not to be able to tell the difference between arsenic and antimony poisoning’ aroused immediate suspicion, and he was soon arrested.
Vials of antimony tartrate were found on him and he was sent to Broadmoor, the asylum for criminal lunatics.
While he was incarcerated there a fellow inmate died of poisoning, in mysterious circumstances.

Young was released after nine years, in February 1971.
Far from being cured, his compulsion to carry on poisoning was undiminished.
A few weeks after he took a job with a photographic firm at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire, head storekeeper Bob Egle began to suffer pains in the back and stomach.
Mr Egle died in July 1971.
Very soon so many of the staff were suffering from stomach upsets that the term ‘Bovingdon bug’ became common parlance.
In October the same year another storekeeper, Fred Biggs, fell ill.
On 31 October Graham Young noted in his diary ‘I have administered a fatal dose of the special compound to F’.
Mr Biggs died three weeks after he was admitted to hospital, cause unknown.
In November 1971 two more Bovingdon employees complained of stomach upsets, ‘pins and needles’ in their feet and found their hair was falling out.
Finally a team of doctors was called in to try to identify the deadly ‘Bovingdon bug’; whereupon Graham Young, a newcomer to the firm who was forever trying to impress by his knowledge, astonished Dr Robert Hynd, the presiding Medical Officer of Health, by asking if the ‘bug’ symptoms were consistent with thallium poisoning.
(Thallium, or T1, is a metallic element found in flue dust resulting from the manufacture of sulphuric acid, and causes gradual paralysis of the nervous system.)

Such a question naturally aroused suspicion, and Scotland Yard was asked if Young had a criminal record.
When his Broadmoor background became known he was arrested on suspicion of murder.
A subsequent search revealed his diary, complete with incriminating entries.
At first Young claimed they were notes intended for a novel; but when he was found to have thallium in his possession (intended as a suicide potion if he were caught) he confessed to murdering both storekeepers, and was imprisoned for life.
His sister Winifred, who had suffered for so long at his hands, told of her brother’s ‘craving for publicity, and notice’ in her book,
Obsessive Poisoner
.
She also said he spoke of loneliness and feelings of depression when he called on her shortly before his arrest (he referred to himself as ‘Your friendly neighbourhood Frankenstein’).
When she suggested he should mix more with other people, Young replied, ‘Nothing like that can help . . .
You see, there’s a terrible coldness inside me.’

A number of serial killers express similar longings to be
important
.
Some, mistaking fame for notoriety, hope to win acclaim by evading arrest while continuing to commit murder galore.
Many genuinely believe they cannot be caught, like Jack the Ripper, and even if mistaken are quick to voice their surprise.
Kenneth Erskine, alias The Stockwell Strangler, told the police who arrested him, ‘I wanted to be famous . . .
I thought you were never going to catch me’.
After he was jailed for the last time, Ted Bundy expected authors Stephen G.
Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth to write their book
¹
not about his crimes, but about
him
: Bundy, the celebrity.
Michaud overcame the problem by persuading him to speculate on ‘the nature of a person capable of doing what Bundy had been accused of doing’ – which the killer happily did.

Paul John Knowles, a young, red-headed American ex-convict who had spent half his adult life in jail, was a rapist and serial killer who murdered at least eighteen people in the four months before he was arrested for the last time, in November 1974.
He was then twenty-eight.
Sandy Fawkes, a visiting British woman journalist who by chance met Knowles before he was arrested and covered the courtroom hearing (
see here
), recognised this longing to be somebody in Knowles’ evident pride on being interviewed by the press.
‘He was having his hour of glory . . .
He was already being referred to as the most heinous killer in history.’ His hour of glory, as it transpired, was no more than that – almost literally.
As Knowles was being transferred the next day to a maximum-security jail, he succeeded in picking the lock on his handcuffs and tried to steal the escorting sheriff’s gun.
FBI agent Ron Angel, however, was quicker on the draw – and shot Knowles dead.

Regardless of the
type
of serial killer concerned, case histories show that most prefer to work alone.
There are a number of instances of convicted serial killers working in pairs, but these are a minority group and usually consist of dominant leader and accomplice.
As with the loners, serial killers who work in pairs are usually male: the man-woman team, while not unknown, is rare.
A serial killer ‘pack’ is rarest of all; these too usually have a dominant leader (like Manson).
The alleged Lainz Hospital medical ‘pack’ is unique, in that all its five first-reported members were female.
The eight members of the Manson gang convicted of the 1969 murders comprised four of each sex: pack leader Manson, Bruce Davis, Clem Grogan and Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, plus females Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme and Leslie van Houten.
No charges were brought against the other two women member of the ‘Family’ – Mary Brunner and Linda Kasabian – who turned state evidence.
On the premise that more than two serial killers constitutes a ‘pack’, the Texan homosexual murderer Dean Corll and his two accomplices, teenagers Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, rate among the more notorious.
Together they took part in the torture, homosexual rape and murder of some twenty-seven youths in the 1970s.
Finally, after Corll ordered Henley to rape and kill a girl of fifteen while Corll sodomised and murdered a male teenager, Henley refused and shot Corll instead.
He and Brooks were later imprisoned for life for their part in the previous murders.