The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (11 page)

Almost all known instances of serial killers working in pairs have occurred in the United States.
They include Patrick Kearney and David Hill, alias ‘The Trashbag Killers’, who murdered thirty homosexuals in Southern California in the late 1970s and put their bodies out for collection in bags, as if they
were normal household refuse.
Ex-convicts Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were arrested in Texas in 1983 after a string of murders, of which Lucas was found guilty of eleven.
How many Lucas alone may have committed can only be guesswork: he killed for the first time at fifteen, and was fifty-one when finally arrested in 1983.
Whilst in custody he ‘confessed’ to more than three hundred murders, but withdrew the ‘confession’ later.
(In any event it was worthless: like so many serial killers, Lucas was found to be a compulsive liar.)

Also in the 1980s Vietnam veteran Leonard Lake and his accomplice, Charles Ng, abducted three women and kept them as their ‘sex slaves’ in a specially-built torture chamber beneath their cabin near Wisleyville, in Calaveras County, California.
The three women were murdered when their captors finally tired of them, as were the two young children abducted with their ‘sex slave’ mothers.
Seven adult males who were subsequently lured to the cabin were also murdered, robbed and buried there.

Two murderers who formed a rare ‘mixed’ pair of serial killers were British – Ian Brady and his mistress Myra Hindley, alias ‘The Moors Murderers’.
In 1966 they were jointly charged with three murders, two of them the murders of children aged ten and twelve respectively.
A unique feature of their trial was that Brady and Hindley stood in a dock protected by bulletproof glass, lest an attempt be made on their lives (there was widespread public outrage over the child murders).
Discreetly, the police described the screen as a ‘draught excluder’.
Brady was found guilty of all three murders, Hindley of two, and of being an accessory to the third.
For both, the timing of the trial was all-important: the death penalty for murder had been abolished just two months earlier.

The numbers of victims murdered by some lone serial killers are occasionally so large that the normal mind reels.
The grim numerical record is thought to be held by a thirty-one-year-old Ecuadoran peasant, Pedro Alonzo Lopez.
Lopez targeted young, pre-pubescent girls.
Four makeshift graves were disturbed in April 1980 when a river overflowed its banks near Ambato (south of the capital Quito, in central Ecuador), and the bodies floated free to raise the alarm.
Lopez was arrested shortly afterwards as he tried unsuccessfully to abduct a girl of eleven.
He later confessed to killing ‘about’ three hundred and fifty, during the two previous years.
In 1986 – again in Ecuador, this time in Quito itself – a transient Colombian serial killer named Daniel Camargo Barbosa confessed to murdering seventy-two girls a year earlier, and was jailed for sixteen years (reportedly the maximum penalty under the law).

When set against such leviathan totals, the numbers of victims regularly attributed to lone serial killers elsewhere sound almost respectably few.
In fact, they serve only to underline how dangerous the species is.
Ted Bundy admitted to twenty-three murders before he was executed in 1989 in ‘Old Sparky’ – criminalese for the electric chair in the state penitentiary at Starke, in Florida.
Most police investigators believe Bundy was ‘good’ for half as many again, probably thirty-four murders.
John Wayne Gacy, the homosexual serial killer from Chicago, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1980 for strangling thirty-three youths.
Charles Manson, who was sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) for nine murders committed in the summer of 1969, privately admitted to thirty-five.
When he first heard this Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson and his ‘Family’, reckoned such a total to be ‘sick boasting’: with hindsight, however, he came to think Manson guilty of understatement.

In the 1980s, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported the pending trial of a man in Vitebsk, Byelorussia (or ‘White Russia’, some three hundred and fifty miles west of Moscow), charged with murdering thirty-three women.
The Tass report was a rare admission, which served to underline the shock effect of multiple murder in communist Russia which, in the days before
glasnost
, censored virtually every public reference to violent crime in the USSR.
The numbers of victims known to have been murdered by convicted British and European serial killers tend to be lower than those of their American or Russian counterparts, if equally alarming in the context of lower national average homicide rates.
Vacher, the French Ripper, murdered fourteen people.
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, took thirteen lives.
Peter Kürten, the Monster of Düsseldorf, who terrorised the Rhineland in the late 1920s (and is regarded by many as second only to the Ripper himself in terms of sexually sadistic brutality), was executed for nine
murders, although he was probably guilty of more.
Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, was convicted of seven murders.
Irish-born John Duffy, ex-railwayman and long-term rapist turned serial killer, stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1988 charged with three murders, multiple rape and other offences.
Duffy was found guilty of two of the murders, and five cases of rape: the judge described him as a ‘predatory animal’, and sentenced him to seven terms of life imprisonment.

There are few set rules governing the criminal behaviour of all serial killers.
Most commit murder – and will continue to commit murder again and again, for as long as they remain free – whenever a compulsive urge, an uncontainable frenzy temporarily dormant within them, suddenly erupts and boils over.
From that moment on the serial killer becomes every whit as lethal as a hired assassin, bent on killing his targeted victim (usually a total stranger) as soon as opportunity presents itself.
Whatever potential risk may be involved is unlikely to serve as a deterrent.
For many serial killers the risk will have been calculated when devising their
modus operandi
; for others, the greater an element of risk incurred, the greater the ‘high’ they attain from the act of killing.

Once in the thrall of this frenzy, the pent-up desires now unleashed will be every bit as compelling, say, as the drug addict’s need of a ‘fix’.
The difference is that this need can be assuaged only by murder, all too often the murder of a complete stranger; a
type
of person known only to the killer himself, since both the type of victim and the way in which he or she will be put to death will have been conceived in fantasy, perhaps years before they meet.
Not until the fantasy-inspired murder has run its course – possibly including violent assault, abduction, rape, torture and/or mutilation – will the frenzy abate, and a ‘cooling-off’ period set in.

What causes this indeterminate, emotional metamorphosis is uncertain.
It may be remorse, or self-disgust even, once the enormity of the offence is fully realised.
Or it may simply be a passing surfeit of murder and mayhem, with their inevitable inner tensions.
Whatever its mainspring, this unique, emotional break in the murder cycle sets the serial killer apart from all other multiple murderers.
Dr James Dobson, the
American psychologist who spoke at length with Ted Bundy on the eve of Bundy’s execution in 1989, was told by Bundy that he felt remorse only once – after the abduction, rape and murder of his first victim, student Lynda Ann Healy.
‘Then the sex frenzy overcame him, and he killed again: and as each crime passed, he became de-sensitised.’

The ‘triggering factor’ which drives the serial killer to commit murder is almost endless in its variety, yet in the context of the violence of the crime often such a trivial thing.
The type of victim he kills is always in the mind: conceived in fantasy, possibly years beforehand and uneasily dormant since.
The serial murderer himself is often an ‘underachiever’, an intelligent person (not an Einstein, but still of obvious promise); yet for some reason the potential has never been realised.
Now, say, he has been sacked.
To his mind, it will always be unfairly; and all the deep-seated hostility he harbours against society now erupts.
He seeks out his symbolic victim – and kills.
Another serial killer may have a ‘dominant female’ stress problem.
After a blazing row with his wife/partner/mother he storms out, has a few drinks (or takes drugs), and ends up murdering a ‘stranger’ victim of opportunity: the classic transferred-aggression syndrome.
Ed Kemper, an unmarried Californian serial killer, lived – and quarrelled incessantly with – his divorced, dominant mother.
His practice was to behead, and later sexually assault, pretty students (the type of girl his mother told him he would never be able to date).
After one row too many, Kemper turned on his mother – and decapitated her.
With some serial killers, the triggering factor may be partly self-induced.
Bundy, for example, blamed pornography for feeding his ‘sick obsessions’.
Medical serial killers, on the other hand, crave the ultimate power (over life and death); and once tasted, their need of it becomes addictive.

No matter what emotion may spark off – or terminate – the unique ‘cooling-off’ period, its duration can vary considerably in the same serial killer, from one murder to the next: from an hour, say, to a day, a week, months possibly and even years.
We see this clearly in the irregular timing of the sixteen murders attributed to the Italian serial killer who became known as ‘The Monster of Florence’ (
Il Mostro
), finally identified in 1993 as a 69-year-old farm labourer named Pietro Pacciani.
‘The Monster’ haunted lovers’ lanes
and holiday camp sites near the Tuscan capital in late summer and autumn.
He played Peeping Tom before shooting the couple – the man first, then raping and mutilating the woman in Ripper style – eight couples in all, in 1968, 1974, 1981 (twice), 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985.
Like Jack the Ripper, he sent body parts to taunt the police.
When a psychiatrist suggested that
Il Mostro
was a mother’s boy because he always left the breasts intact, he sent the left breast of his next victim to the investigating magistrate.

Pacciani was arrested in January 1993 through a phone tip-off.
A bullet embedded in a post in his garden proved to be fired from the murder weapon, a Beretta, and some of the victims’ belongings were allegedly found in his home.
Pacciani had already spent six years in prison for murdering a girlfriend’s lover in 1951, and forcing her to have sex beside the corpse.
The prosecution painted Pacciani as a brutal man who ‘treated his family like beasts’ and forced incest on his two daughters.

But although sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994, he was freed on appeal in February 1996.
The public prosecutor, Piero Tony, then tried to reopen the case, alleging that he had a confession from a man he believed to be Pacciani’s accomplice in the crimes, Mario Vanni.
Four witnesses who declined to be named (but were called by the prosecutor alpha, beta, gamma and delta) would offer evidence of the guilt of Pacciani and Vanni.
But Judge Francisco Ferri declined to accept this late evidence, and refused to reopen the case.
As of this writing, Vanni remains in prison but Pacciani remains free.

Sexually sadistic serial killers like the Ripper, Vacher, Sutcliffe, Kemper and II Mostro, etc., who torture and/or mutilate their victims, form a minority sub-species of serial killer known as ‘lust murderers’.
The sheer brutality of their crimes makes them the most feared of all sex murderers.
In 1950, author and criminologist Dr J.
Paul de River said of them in his book,
Crime and the Sexual Psychopath
, ‘The lust murderer usually, after killing his victim, tortures, cuts, maims or slashes the victim in the regions on or about the genitalia, rectum, breast in the female, and about the neck, throat and buttocks, as usually these parts contain sexual significance to him and serve as sexual stimulus.’

Thirty years later, two senior special agents from the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI at Quantico – Robert R.
(‘Roy’) Hazelwood and John E.
Douglas – put the lust killer under their joint behavioural microscope.
Both agents were already vastly experienced in the ways of the serial killer, and are recognised today as authorities on criminal profiling.
They describe lust murder as: ‘One of the most heinous crimes committed by man.
While not a common occurrence, it is one which frightens and arouses the public as does no other crime . . .
It is the authors’ contention that the lust murder is unique, and is distinguished from the sadistic homicide by the involvement of a mutilating attack or displacement of the breasts, rectum or genitals.
Further, while there are always exceptions, basically two types of individuals commit the lust murder . . .
the Organised Nonsocial and Disorganised Asocial personalities.’

Briefly, they define the
organised nonsocial
lust killer as an egocentric who dislikes people generally, yet is adept at posing as an outwardly warm person for as long as may be needed to gain his own ends.
Behind the façade lies a cunning methodical killer who is very much aware of the impact his sort of murder will have on society – and commits it for precisely that reason, to shock and offend.
Usually he ‘lives some distance from the crime scene and will cruise, looking for a victim’.
Like his disorganised, fellow lust killer he ‘harbours similar feelings of hostility (to society) but . . .
overtly expresses it through aggressive and seemingly senseless acts.
Typically, he begins to demonstrate his hostility as he passes through puberty and into adolescence.
He would be described as a troublemaker and a manipulator of people, concerned only for himself.
It is the nonsocial’s aim to get even with society and inflict pain and punishment upon others.’

In contrast, the
disorganised asocial
lust killer is a loner.
‘He experiences difficulty in negotiating interpersonal relationships and consequently feels rejected and lonely.
He lacks the cunning of the nonsocial type, and commits the crime in a more frenzied and less methodical manner.
The crime is likely to be committed in close proximity to his residence or place of employment, where he feels secure and more at ease . . .
Family and associates would describe him as a nice, quiet person who keeps himself to himself, but who never quite realised his potential.
During adolescence he may have engaged in voyeuristic activities or the theft of feminine clothing.
Such activities serve as a substitute for his inability to approach women sexually in a mature and confident manner.’