The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (28 page)

On 14 September the big man driving a green Chevrolet picked up a nineteen-year-old girl named Gwen Burton, whose car had broken down, and offered to drive home to get tools.
When they were outside town, he grabbed her by the neck and forced her to fellate him.
After this he ripped off her jeans and underwear, then throttled her.
She recovered consciousness to find herself lying on a blanket in a field.
The man forced her to commit oral sodomy, then inserted a hammer handle into her vagina, tearing the hymen.
After that he punched her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her, and battered her with the hammer.

When Gwen Burton woke up again, she succeeded in crawling to a road, where a tractor stopped for her.
In hospital, her life was saved by immediate surgery – there were fragments of bone in the brain tissue.
She recovered eventually, but her health was permanently impaired.

On 18 September 1974 the body of a woman was found in Sherburne County, north of Minneapolis; she had been killed with hammer blows, and her vagina had been lacerated by some hard object, probably a hammer handle.
She was eventually identified as Eileen Hunley, missing since August.

A few days later, the man in the green Chevrolet picked up two girls, and offered them twenty-five dollars to help him recover a car.
On a lonely road he began to talk about rape, and when one of the girls asked how far they still had to go, he hit her in the mouth.
Their abductor had to stop for gas, and the girls managed to escape.

On 20 September an eighteen-year-old girl named Kathy Schultz disappeared from Minneapolis; the following day, her violated body was found by two hunters forty miles north of Minneapolis; she had been killed with hammer blows.

Now, at least, the police had several good descriptions of the man they sought: middle-aged, balding and very big, and driving a green Chevrolet.
On 24 September 1974 two policeman on patrol saw a man who answered that description, and watched as he approached a green Chevrolet.
When they pulled up behind the car, it drove off at speed; they eventually forced it to move over.
The driver identified himself as Harvey Carignan.
When four of the attacker’s victims unhesitatingly picked him out in a line-up, Harvey Carignan’s career of rape and murder was at an end.

On 14 February 1975 Harvey Carignan was tried on charges relating to Gwen Burton, the girl who had been sodomised and left for dead.

The line taken by Carignan’s defence was that he was guilty but insane.
Carignan himself told the jury that he had picked up Gwen Burton because God had told him to.
In fact, he insisted that he frequently held conversations with God, and that it was God who told him to kill.
The jurors chose to disbelieve that he was insane, and found him guilty on all counts.
Before sentencing, he was tried for the attack on the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, Jerri Billings.
This time, Carignan simply denied that he had ever seen her.
Again the jury disbelieved him, and found him guilty.
Harvey Carignan was sentenced to sixty years in prison.
Even with one third remission for good conduct, this meant that he would serve forty years.

In the following year, Carignan saved the taxpayers the expense of a trial when he pleaded guilty to murdering Kathy Schultz.
He unexpectedly pleaded not guilty to murdering Eileen Hunley.
Again, the evidence was against him, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

After the Gwen Burton trial, Harvey Carignan was sent to St Peter State Hospital for a psychiatric examination.
The story he told made it clear that here was yet another classic case of the serial killer syndrome.
He had been an illegitimate child and the father – a young doctor – declined to stand by the girl he had made pregnant.
Harvey was an undersized, lonely child who wet the bed far beyond the usual age.
His mother had been only seventeen at the time of his birth, and she showed little affection for the child who had disrupted her life.
‘She was pretty mean,’ Carignan told psychiatrists.
His mother married when he was four, and bore a second son.
Harvey’s life became even more lonely and loveless.
As the bedwetting became worse, he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle.
They soon tired of him and sent him back.
When he also began to steal, he was sent to a reform school in Mandan, North Dakota.
He was only just twelve years old, and he stayed there until he was eighteen, old enough to join the army.

In order to escape from a life that he found intolerable, Harvey Carignan became an obsessive reader and daydreamer.
He was, in fact, highly intelligent, and in different circumstances, would probably have done well.
In spite of his almost permanent scowl, he possessed a great deal of charm; in jail he was a model prisoner, and one of his warders described him as ‘a perfect gentleman’.

Perhaps the strangest part of Carignan’s account of his childhood is his insistence that he was sexually assaulted by several older women; this, he insisted, was what made him feel defensive and hostile towards women, so that any sign of rejection turned to uncontrollable rage.
The psychiatrists were inclined to doubt the truth of the story; but there can be little doubt that Carignan believed it happened.
It was his rage at being rejected by an older woman in Anchorage, Alaska, that led to his first murder, and to the death sentence that almost ended his career of murder three decades earlier.

In her book on the case,
The Want-Ad Killer
, Ann Rule comments: ‘There is, today, no known treatment that is effective in changing the structure of the antisocial personality.
The defect is believed to originate in early childhood, usually before the age of five, and once the child is so damaged, his complete lack of compassion for others only becomes more solidly entrenched as he grows to manhood.’

In Carignan’s case, as in that of Cameron Hooker, Robert Poulin, Harvey Glatman, and other killers discussed in this chapter, the frustrated craving for affection turned into a craving for power over the women who denied it.
This seems to explain why, although normally sexually potent, Carignan preferred to violate his victims with a hammer handle.
Rape with a penis would have seemed close to an act of love-making, and Carignan had no intention of expressing love: only rage, and the desire to obliterate.

While a psychologist would undoubtedly classify Folk, Hansen and Carignan as ‘degenerates’, none could be described as a psychotic: that is, as clinically insane.

Reinhardt comments: ‘While I do not attempt here to draw fine distinctions between “degeneracy” and various forms of psychoses, there is no question in my mind that many sadists, as well as other sexually perverted types, suffer marked psychoses’ – in other words,
are
technically insane.
Reinhardt is discussing a sadistic pervert named Albert Fish, who was executed in Sing Sing in January 1936.
Fish remains the classic example of the psychotic serial killer.

On 28 May 1928 a mild-looking old man called on the family of a doorman named Albert Budd in a basement in Manhattan.
He explained he had come in answer to a job advertisement placed in a New York newspaper by Budd’s eighteen-year-old son Edward.
His name, he said, was Frank Howard, and he owned a farm on Long Island.
The old man so charmed the Budds that the following day they allowed him to take their ten-year-old daughter Grace to a party; she left in a white confirmation dress, holding Howard’s hand.
The Budds never saw Grace again; the address at which the party was supposed to be held proved fictitious, and no farmer by the name of Frank Howard could be traced on Long Island.
The kidnap received wide publicity, and the police investigated hundreds of tips.
Detective Will King of the Missing Persons Bureau became particularly obsessed with the crime and travelled thousands of miles in search of ‘Frank Howard’.

Six years later, the Budds received an unsigned letter that was clearly from the kidnapper.
He stated that he had taken Grace Budd to an empty house in Westchester, then left her picking flowers while he went inside and stripped off his clothes; then he leaned out of the upstairs window and called her in.
Confronted by this skinny naked man, Grace began to cry and tried to run away; he seized her and strangled her.
Then he cut her in half, and took the body back home, where he ate parts of it.
‘How sweet her little ass was, roasted in the oven.
It took me nine days to eat her entire body.
I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished.’ (In fact, Fish was to admit to his attorney that this was untrue.) Finally, he took the bones back to the cottage and buried them in the garden.

With a brilliant piece of detective work, Will King traced the writer – the letter had arrived in an envelope with the inked-out logo of a chauffeurs’ benevolent association on the flap.
One of the chauffeurs finally admitted that he had taken some of the association’s stationery and left it in a room he used to rent on East 52nd Street.
This now proved to be rented by a tenant who called himself A.H.Fish, and his handwriting in the boarding house register was identical with that of the letter writer.
King kept watch on the room for three weeks before Albert Fish – the mild little old man – returned.
He agreed unhesitatingly to go to headquarters for questioning, but at the street door, suddenly lunged at King with a razor in each hand.
King disarmed and handcuffed him.
Back at police headquarters, Fish made no attempt to deny the murder of Grace Budd.
He had gone to her home, he explained, with the intention of killing her brother Edward, but when Grace had sat on his knee during dinner, had decided that he wanted to eat her.

He took the police to the cottage in Westchester, where they unearthed the bones of Grace Budd.
Later, under intensive questioning, he admitted to killing about four hundred children since 1910.
(The figure has never been confirmed, and a judge involved in the case placed the true figure at sixteen.)

Soon after his arrest, Fish was visited by a psychiatrist named Fredrick Wertham, who would appear for the defence.
‘He looked’, wrote Wertham, ‘like a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite.
If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose.’ When Fish realised that Wertham really wanted to understand him, he became completely open and forthcoming.

Fish was a strange paradox of a man.
His face lit up when he talked of his twelve-year-old grandchild, and he was obviously sincere when he said: ‘I love children and was always soft-hearted.’ He was also deeply religious, and read his Bible continuously.
The answer to the paradox, Wertham soon concluded, was that Fish was insane.
He genuinely believed that God told him to murder children.

Albert Hamilton Fish had been born in Washington, DC, in 1870; his father, a riverboat captain, was seventy-five at the time.
Various members of the family had mental problems and one suffered from religious mania.
One brother was feeble-minded and another an alcoholic.
The father had died when Fish was five years old, and he was placed in an orphanage, from which he regularly ran away.
On leaving school he was apprenticed to a house painter, and this remained his profession for the rest of his life.
Access to other people’s homes also gave him access to children.
He was twenty-eight when he first married, but his wife eloped with the lodger.
Later, there were three more marriages, all bigamous.

Fish talked with complete frankness about his sex life – he had always enjoyed writing obscene letters, and no doubt confessing to Wertham gave him the same kind of pleasure.
Wertham wrote:

‘Fish’s sexual life was of unparalleled perversity . . .1 found no published case that would even nearly compare with his . . .
There was no known perversion that he did not practise and practise frequently.

‘Sado-masochism directed against children, particularly boys, took the lead in his sexual regressive development.
“I have always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me.
I always seemed to enjoy anything that hurt.
The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.” Experiences with excreta of every imaginable kind were practised by him, actively and passively.
He took bits of cotton wool, saturated them with alcohol, inserted them in his rectum and set fire to them.
He also did this to his child victims.
Finally, and clearly also on a sexual basis, he developed a craving going back to one of the arch-crimes of humanity – cannibalism.

‘I elicited from him a long history of how he preyed on children.
In many instances – I stated under oath later “at least a hundred” – he seduced them or bribed them with small sums of money or forced them and attacked them.
He often worked in public buildings and had an excuse for spending times in cellars and basements and even garrets.
He would put on his painters’ overalls over his nude body, and that permitted him to undress in a moment . . .

‘Most, if not all, of his victims came from the poorer classes.
He told me that he selected coloured children especially, because the authorities didn’t pay much attention when they were hurt or missing.
For example, he once paid a small coloured girl five dollars regularly to bring him little coloured boys . . .Frequently after a particularly brutal episode he would change his address completely . . .
Altogether he roamed over twenty-three states, from New York to Montana.
“And I have had children in every state.” He also made a habit of writing letters to women, trying to persude them to join him in whipping boys.

‘Fish told me that for years he had been sticking needles into his body in the region near his genitals, in the area between the rectum and the scrotum.
He told me of doing it to other people too, especially to children.
At first, he said, he had only stuck these needles in and pulled them out again.
They were needles of assorted sizes, some of them big sail needles.
Then he had stuck others in so far that he was unable to get them out, and they stayed there.
“They’re in there now,” he said.
“I put them up under the spine . . .I did put one in the scrotum too; but I couldn’t stand the pain.”