The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (3 page)

The next great advance occurred in England, where Sir Francis Galton realised that no two persons have the same fingerprints.
The first case to be solved by a fingerprint occurred in a small town in Argentina in 1892; a young mother named Francisca Rojas had murdered her two children and tried to put the blame on a peasant called Velasquez; an intelligent police chief named Alvarez observed a bloody fingerprint on the door, and established that it belonged to Francisca; she then confessed that she had been hoping to persuade a young lover to marry her, but that her ‘illegitimate brats’ stood in the way . . .
When fingerprinting was introduced at Scotland Yard in 1902, it was so successful that Bertillon’s more complicated system was quickly abandoned.
All over the world, ‘bertillonage’ was quickly replaced by the new fingerprint system.
¹

It was at this point, when science seemed to be transforming the craft of the manhunter, that killers like Jack the Ripper and Joseph Vacher made a mockery of all attempts to catch them.
A well-known cartoon published at the time of the Ripper murders showed policemen blundering around with blindfolds over their eyes.
Scientific crime detection depended on finding some
link
between the crime and the criminal.
If a rich old dowager was poisoned, compiling a list of suspects was easy; the police merely had to find out who would benefit in her will, and which of these had access to poison.
But the sex killer struck at random and, unless he left some clue behind, there was nothing to link him to the victim.

One important advance offered hope of a partial solution.
In 1901, a young Viennese doctor, Paul Uhlenhuth, discovered a method for testing whether a bloodstain was animal or human.
Blood is made up of red cells and a colourless liquid called serum.
Uhlenhuth discovered that if a rabbit is injected with chicken blood, its serum develops a ‘resistance’ to chicken blood.
And if a drop of chicken blood is then dropped into a test tube containing serum from the rabbit, the serum turns cloudy.
It was obvious that the same method could be used to detect human blood, for when an animal is injected with human blood, its serum will then turn cloudy if a drop of human blood – or even a few drops of dried blood in a salt solution – is introduced into it.
In 1901, Uhlenhuth used his method to help convict a sadistic killer of children.
Ludwig Tessnow was a carpenter, and in 1898 he had been a suspect when two little girls were killed and dismembered in a village near Osnabrück.
Tessnow had insisted that brown stains on his clothes were wood dye, and the police believed him.
When, three years later, two young brothers were killed in the same manner – literally torn to pieces – on the island of Rügen, Tessnow was again a suspect; again he insisted that stains on his clothing were of wood dye.
The police sent his clothes to Uhlenhuth, who was able to show that some stains were of human blood, and that others were of sheep’s blood (Tessnow was also suspected of disembowelling sheep).
He was executed in 1904.

Tessnow had been living in the areas where the murders took place; but if he had been a tramp, like Vacher, he might never have been caught.
This may not have been apparent in 1902, but as the rate of sex crime began steadily to rise in the second decade of the twentieth century, it became increasingly obvious.
If a sex criminal observed a reasonable degree of caution, there was nothing to stop him from going on for years.
In Cinkota, near Budapest, a plumber named Bela Kiss killed at least a dozen women between 1912 and 1914, storing most of the bodies in oil drums; he had been conscripted into the army by the time someone found the corpses in his cottage, and he was never caught.
In Hanover soon after the First World War, a homosexual butcher named Fritz Haarmann killed about fifty youths, and disposed of their bodies by selling them for meat.
Georg Grossmann, a Berlin pedlar, killed an unknown number of girls during the same period, and also sold them for meat.
(When police burst into his flat in 1921, they found the trussed-up carcase of a girl lying on the bed, ready for butchering.) Karl Denke, a Munsterberg landlord, made a habit of butchering strangers, and eating their flesh; when he was arrested in 1924, police found the pickled remains of thirty bodies, and Denke admitted that he had been eating nothing but human flesh for three years.
These four killers escaped notice because they killed their victims on their own premises.
All were undoubtedly motivated by sex.

Sex killers who moved around were equally elusive.
Between 1910 and 1934, an itinerant carpenter named Albert Fish tortured and killed an unknown number of children – he confessed to four hundred – and was finally caught only because he was careless enough to put a letter describing one of the murders in an envelope that could be traced.
During 1926 and 1927, a travelling rapist and murderer killed twenty-two women in America and Canada, starting in San Francisco and ending in Winnipeg, and in the meantime travelling as far east as Philadelphia.
Most of the victims were landladies who advertised rooms to rent, and their naked bodies were usually found in the room they were offering.
For a long time the police were not even aware of what the killer looked like, but eventually a woman to whom he had sold some jewellery – taken from a victim – was able to describe him as a polite young man with a simian mouth and jaw.
The police eventually caught up with Earle Nelson, the ‘Gorilla Murderer’, simply because he was unable to stop killing, and left a well-defined trail of corpses behind him.
In Düsseldorf during 1929, an unknown sadist attacked men, women and children, stabbing them or knocking them unconscious with a hammer.
Eight victims were killed; many others were stabbed or beaten unconscious.
The killer, Peter Kürten, was eventually caught when one of his rape victims led police to his flat.
In Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-1930s, a killer who became known as the ‘Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ killed and dismembered a dozen men and women, mostly derelicts and prostitutes; in two cases, two victims were killed at the same time and the dismembered parts of the bodies mixed together.
The murders ceased in 1938, and the ‘Cleveland Torso Killer’ was never caught.

Yet in spite of the notoriety achieved by these mass murderers, sex crime remained at a fairly low level during the 1930s.
It accelerated during the Second World War – partly because the anarchic social atmosphere produced a loss of inhibition, partly because soldiers were deprived of their usual sexual outlet.
By 1946, sex crime had doubled in England from its pre-war level.
In large American cities, it had quadrupled by 1956.
Even in Japan, where sex crime was still rare, a laundry worker – and employee of the American army – named Yoshio Kodaira raped and murdered ten girls in Tokyo between May 1945 and August 1946.
He had made the mistake of giving his last victim his name and address when he offered her a job in his laundry, and she had left it with her parents; Kodaira was hanged in October 1949.

By the time I began compiling
An Encyclopedia of Murder
in 1959, a strange new type of crime was beginning to emerge – ‘the motiveless crime’.
In April 1959, a bachelor named Norman Smith, who lived alone in his caravan in Florida, watched a television programme called ‘The Sniper’, then took a pistol, and went out with the intention of shooting someone – anyone.
The victim happened to be a Mrs Hazel Woodard, who was killed as she sat watching television.
Colin commented: ‘Apparently he killed out of boredom,’ and compared it with the case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two wealthy Chicago students who decided to commit a murder simply as a ‘challenge’.
In May 1924 they chose at random a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobbie Franks and battered him to death with a chisel.
They were caught because Leopold lost his glasses at the site where the body was dumped.
The strange motivation – or lack of it – led journalists to label the murder ‘the crime of the century’.
In June 1949, a pretty nineteen-year-old brunette named Ruth Steinhagen checked into the Edgewater Beach hotel in Chicago, and sent a note to a man whom she had adored from afar for two years: baseball player Eddie Waitkus, the unmarried first baseman of the Phillies; she asked if she could see him briefly to tell him something of great importance.
In her room, she pointed a rifle at him and shot him dead.
Asked why she did it, she explained that she ‘wanted the thrill of murdering him’.
By the late 1950s, such crimes were ceasing to be unusual.
In July 1958, a man named Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico, and with a rifle shot dead two children as they stood beside their mother; when caught, he explained that he wanted to do something about the population explosion.
In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland accepted a lift from a man she knew slightly, and shot him dead with a revolver; traced through the bullet, she explained that she was curious to see if she could commit a murder and not have it on her conscience.

During the 1960s, there was a perceptible rise in such crimes.
In 1960, a young German named Klaus Gosmann knocked on the door of a flat he had chosen at random, and shot dead the man who opened the door, as well as his fiancée, who was standing behind him.
Then he turned and walked away.
He committed four more ‘random’ murders before he was caught.
In November 1966, an eighteen-year-old student named Robert Smith walked into a beauty parlour in Mesa, Arizona, ordered five women and two children to lie down on the floor, and shot them all in the back of the head.
Both Gosmann and Smith were highly intelligent, regarded by their professors as good students.
Yet apparently both suffered from a sense of boredom, of unreality.
Smith’s explanation of his motive provides the vital clue to this new type of murder.
‘I wanted to become known, to get myself a name.’ He felt that killing seven people would ensure that his name appeared in newspapers around the world.
The ‘motiveless murderer’ who began to emerge in the late 1950s was usually suffering from a kind of ego-starvation, a desire to be ‘recognised’.
In short, such murders are not committed out of sexual frustration, but out of a frustrated craving for ‘self-esteem’.

This seemed to provide an interesting clue to what was going on.
In the 1940s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow had suggested an interesting theory of human motivation, which he called the ‘hierarchy of needs’.
Maslow pointed out that if a man is starving to death, his basic need is for food; he imagines that if he could have two square meals a day he would be completely happy.
If he achieves this aim, then a new level of need emerges – for security, a roof over his head; every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage.
If he achieves this too, then the next level emerges: for love, for sex, for emotional satisfaction.
If this level is achieved, then yet another level emerges: for self-esteem, the satisfaction of the need to be liked and respected.

These four ‘levels’ could be clearly seen in the history of criminality over the past two centuries.
In the eighteenth century there was so much poverty and starvation that most crime was committed out of a simple need for survival – Maslow’s first level.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the most notorious crimes are domestic murders that take place in respectable middle-class homes, and the motive is a desire to preserve domestic security.
Towards the end of the century, Maslow’s third level emerges: sex crime.
In the mid-twentieth century, the fourth level – self-esteem – becomes a motive for murder.
It is as if society is passing through the same stages as the individual; and since society is composed of individuals, this may be less absurd than it sounds.

Now obviously, no murder can be genuinely without motive; when we label a crime motiveless we are simply admitting that it cannot be classified under the usual headings.
When we drum our fingers impatiently on the tabletop, the action seems to have no motive, but a zoologist would say that it is a ‘displacement activity’, and that it is due to frustration.
In the same way, Robert Smith’s murders in the Arizona beauty parlour were not truly motiveless; they were an expression of boredom and
resentment
.
This leads to the recognition that resentment can be detected in the majority of motiveless crimes.
This resentment is often totally paranoid in character – like the desire to ‘do something about the population explosion’ that drove Norman Foose to shoot two children.
A more recent example occurred near Santa Cruz, California, when a ‘dropout’ with an obsession about the environment murdered a whole family.
On 19 October 1970 the house of Dr Victor Ohta, an eye surgeon, was seen to be on fire.
Firemen discovered five bodies in the swimming pool – those of Dr Ohta, his wife and two children, and his secretary Dorothy Cadwallader.
Under the windscreen wiper of his Rolls-Royce was a note that declared that ‘today World War III will begin’, and that anyone who misused the environment would from now on suffer the penalty of death.
‘Materialism must die or mankind must stop.’ It was signed: ‘Knight of Wands – Knight of Pentacles – Knight of Cups – Knight of Swords’ – these being cards in the Tarot pack.
The surgeon’s estate car had been driven into a railway tunnel, obviously in the hope of causing a serious accident, but a slow-moving goods train had pushed it out of the way.

In nearby woods there was a colony of ‘hippies’, and one of these told the police about a twenty-four-year-old car mechanic named John Linley Frazier who had recently deserted his wife and moved into a shack near the village of Felton; it was approached by a kind of drawbridge across a deep ditch, and Frazier apparently drew this up every night.
He had told other hippies that he had burgled the Ohtas’ house on an earlier occasion, and that they were ‘too materialistic’ and ought to be killed.
Frazier was taken in for questioning, and his fingerprints on the Rolls-Royce established his guilt beyond all doubt.
The evidence indicated that he had planned the murders several days in advance, and he was sentenced to death.
It also became clear at the trial that there was no foundation for his charge that the Ohtas were destroying the environment – they had taken care to leave the woodland around their house untouched.
Nor could Ohta be accused of materialism – he helped finance a local hospital and often gave free treatment to those who could not afford his fees.
The murders were based upon the same kind of paranoid resentment that had led Charles Manson to write ‘Death to pigs’ in blood on the bedroom wall of one victim.