The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (32 page)

We have seen that the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome has many strange variations.
The sufferer may attempt to deal with it through a variety of techniques, ranging from intellectual self-justification in the manner of de Sade to making some absurd error that leads to arrest.
In a few cases, the ‘suicide syndrome’ results in actual self-destruction.

On 16 July 1973 a hysterical teenage girl who identified herself as Mary Ellen Jones rushed into a police station in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and told the police that her boyfriend had been murdered, and that she had been repeatedly raped by the killer.
Two days previously, the young couple – who had met only the day before on the local beach – had been offered a lift by a middle-aged man driving a white Dodge van.
He had introduced himself as ‘Eric’, and offered to give them work in his home in south Miami.
Once inside the bungalow, the man had threatened them with a gun and told them to undress.
Then he ordered them to perform various abnormal sex acts while he took photographs.
In order to hold the camera, he had to place the gun beside him.
The youth – sixteen-year-old Mark Matson – waited his chance, then hurled himself at their tormentor.
He was not quick enough; ‘Eric’ snatched up the gun and fired three times, hitting the youth in the head, shoulder and chest.
Then he dragged the body into the bathroom, and took the girl through a steel-lined door and into a soundproof compartment at the end of his bedroom.
There he shackled her to the wall, and raped her repeatedly for twenty-four hours.
At the end of that time, when she was expecting to die, he unchained her, telling her: ‘I’ve taken a life, but now I’m going to give you your life.’ He drove her back into Fort Lauderdale and released her.

She hurried to the nearest police station.
When the police learned she was a runaway, they telephoned her home in Frankfort, Kentucky; the girl’s mother told them that she was a pathological liar, and advised them not to believe a word she said.
The mother then wired money, and the girl was sent home by plane to Kentucky.

Five days later, on Saturday, 21 July 1973, a housewife in South Dade County was removing washing from her clothesline when she noticed that her next-door neighbour, Albert Brust, was sitting in a chair on his lawn, oblivious of the falling rain.
And when her son mentioned that Brust had been there for the past two days, she rang the Fort Lauderdale police and told them: ‘I think there’s a dead man in the garden next door.’

An autopsy revealed that Albert Brust, a forty-four-year-old Dade County building inspector, had taken a dose of cyanide in chocolate milk.
When the police entered his house, they noticed the unpleasant smell, like rotting meat.
It came from the bathroom.
When the shower curtain was pulled aside, they found themselves looking at a wall of concrete, from which a little blood was seeping.
It had to be demolished piecemeal before it revealed a mutilated body, minus its hands, feet and head.
The head had been obscenely placed between the thighs, and the hands and feet were found embedded in the concrete.
At that point, the police remembered Mary Ellen Jones’s story, and realised that she must have been telling the truth.

A search of the rest of the house made it clear that Albert Brust was a ‘sex freak’ obsessed with torture.
In fact, the room at the end of the bedroom – in which the teenage girl had been raped – had obviously been designed as a torture chamber, with chains hanging from the ceiling, and a variety of whips, cat o’ nine tails, belts and padlocks.
An item of furniture of peculiar design was apparently a ‘Chinese raping stool’.
There were also pornographic videos and books, and obscene pictures on the walls.
Yet he possessed many gramophone records, and the bookcase contained a wide range of philosophical texts, from Spinoza and Voltaire to Unamuno and William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience
.
Brust also owned several volumes of the Marquis de Sade, whose works had been published openly in America in the 1960s.

Investigation into Brust’s background revealed that he was a New Yorker, born in 1929.
When he was twenty-one, he had been sentenced to a term of from three to ten years in jail for abduction, assault, robbery and grand larceny.
In prison he learned carpentry and welding, and taught himself calculus.
He became a construction worker for twelve years before moving, in 1972, to Dade County, Florida, where he obtained a position as an inspector of buildings.
This ugly, short little man had few friends.
He drove a powerful motor cycle, and frequented a local motor-cycle shop, apparently hoping to find sex (he was bisexual).
The owner of the shop commented that Brust described himself as a Jekyll and Hyde personality, and that he talked a great deal of sex, suicide and murder.
Brust had told him that he had killed someone in New York and disposed of the body in the East River, and that he had once ‘concreted’ somebody.
‘When you first kill someone,’ Brust told him, ‘it’s like breaking the ice.
It’s an obstacle in the beginning, but after that nothing.’

These remarks led the police to dig up Brust’s back garden and to search his house carefully for more signs of ‘concreting’.
They found nothing.

Like so many ‘loners’, Brust kept a journal, and it revealed a negative, morbid personality.
‘Rape, murder, suicide.
These thoughts are constantly with me . . .Of course, this is not mentally ‘healthy’ – there is no doubt that by present standards I am mentally ill, a hopeless sociopath.’ ‘My reason tells me that I have nothing to live for.
Intellectually, sexually, occupationally, socially – everywhere a dead end.
The pain now outweighs the pleasure and every day adds weight to the logic of self-destruction.’ ‘I need this safety valve, this writing, to keep me straight and calm and determined to bring my – death project – to a successful end.’ The ‘death project’, apparently, was suicide.
He suffered, he said, from ‘alienation and sexual frustration and creative impotence.’ There is a classic statement of the problem of the ‘romantic outsider’: ‘While my books have a tranquilising effect on me, reinforcing the Dr Jekyll side of my personality, it is also true that they paralyse me into inaction.
They cause me to think about death, to be fatalistic and pessimistic, prone to suicide.’ ‘The culprit is my emotions.
Once stirred, blind rage tends to take over and I get both homicidal and suicidal.’ Brust’s philosophy was that man was evil, that government was useless, and that society must be strictly controlled.
These views led him to express admiration for Hitler; he also enjoyed talking, in a mock-German accent, about what should be done with Jews.

Brust was irritable, sarcastic and aggressive.
‘He thought he was above everyone else,’ said one of his acquaintances.
‘And the terrible thing was, it was true.’ Brust had passed a University of Chicago correspondence course in algebra and analytic geometry; but years of frustration had developed a highly intolerant personality.
‘He hated Catholics, cats, dogs – almost everything,’ said the motor cycle shop owner.
He craved a woman, but was only willing to contemplate a relationship with one who was willing to be his slave.
He told a woman psychology student that he had once thought of marrying a blonde female acquaintance, ‘big in bosom and bottom’, and decidedly dumb, but had changed his mind.
Incredibly, it seems probable that, at forty-four, he was still a virgin.
‘After work I always get home as soon as possible to enjoy my solitary sanctuary and its music and books and TV.
No sex yet, but I’m working on it – slowly, but with determined resolve.
I know what I want.
I need someone for sex, yes – but not an idiot I have to cater to.
Enter the Brustian solution . . .’ The ‘Brustian solution’ was to kidnap a girl and hold her as his slave in the ‘torture chamber’.
His opportunity came when he saw Mark Matson and Mary Ellen Jones hitchhiking out of Fort Lauderdale; but the orgy that followed left him as unsatisfied as the murder of Kim Rabat had left Robert Poulin – whom, in spite of the twenty-seven-year age difference, Brust resembles in so many ways.
‘I have miscalculated’, Brust wrote.’ . . .1 know I can save the situation by a lot of disagreeable work’ – he obviously meant recovering Mark Matson’s body and burying it in the garden – ‘but I see no good reason for going on.
What would come next?
The whole business is not worth it; life is not worth the trouble after all.’ After completing this entry, he poured himself a glass of chocolate milk, added cyanide, and sat down on his lawn to drink it.

In 1987, another ‘sex slave’ case made headlines across America; this time it had ended in two fatalities.
The psychiatric evidence that emerged means that we know a great deal more about Gary Heidnik than about Melvin Rees or Albert Brust.
But although a jury found him sane, there can be little doubt that Heidnik was as psychotic as Albert Fish.
The case offers an example of yet another stratagem by which the unconscious mind deals with the problems of the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome.

Towards midnight on 24 March 1987 a black prostitute, Josefina Rivera, knocked frantically on the door of her boyfriend’s apartment in Philadelphia.
Vincent Nelson had not seen her since the previous November, when she had gone out on a rainy evening to ‘turn a trick’.
Now he was shocked to see how much she had changed in four months; she looked like a concentration-camp victim.
He was even more startled by the words she was babbling – his first suspicion was that she was full of drugs.
She seemed to be saying that three women were being kept chained up in a basement, and that two more were dead.
Nelson finally called the police.
The two men who arrived in a squad car were at first equally sceptical; but when she showed them marks around her ankles where she had been manacled, they decided that it might be worth investigating after all.
The house in which Josefina alleged she had been held was three blocks away, on a slum street called North Marshall.
A thin-faced, bearded man opened the door, and raised his hands when he saw drawn guns.
Had they come about his child support payments?
he wanted to know.
The policeman assured him it was more serious, and took him to headquarters – the Sex Crimes Unit.
His name was Gary Michael Heidnik, and he was forty-three years old.

At five o’clock the following morning, police with a search warrant broke down the door at 3520 North Marshall Street – arousing the neighbours – and rushed down to the basement.
On a mattress in the middle of the room lay two black women, huddled under blankets; they screamed as the police burst in, but when they realised that the intruders had come to rescue them, they shouted ‘We’re free!’ and kissed their hands.
Neither seemed to be embarrassed by the fact that they were naked from the waist down.
In a deep hole in the floor – covered over by a board – there was another black woman, this one completely naked, with shackles on her ankles and her wrists handcuffed behind her back.

The story that emerged was appalling and incredible.
Josefina Rivera had been the first captive.
Heidnik, driving an expensive car, had picked her up towards midnight on 26 November 1986.
Josefina was also impressed by the walls of his bedroom, which were papered with five and ten dollar bills.
After sex, she began to dress again, but as she did so, Heidnik seized her by the throat and throttled her until she came close to blacking out.
When he released her, she gasped that she would do whatever he wanted if he promised not to hurt her.
He handcuffed her and took her down to a cold, mildewy basement.
There he chained her, fixing around her ankle a clamp of the type used to suspend a car exhaust.
The next day, he came down to the basement, and dug a hole in a spot where the concrete had been removed.
She was afraid it was her grave, but his manner as he talked reassured her.
He told her that what he wanted most in all the world was a large family, and that he intended to capture ten women, keep them in the basement, and make them all pregnant.
He explained that he had once had a baby daughter by a black woman – he seemed uninterested in whites – but he had helped her sister to escape from a mental institution.
As a result he had been charged with the rape of the sister and sentenced to four years in prison – which was unfair, since the sex had been voluntary.
His daughter had been placed in a home.
‘Society owes me a wife and family,’ he told her – after which he made her perform oral sex on him, then had vaginal sex with her.

Later that day, Josefina succeeded in forcing open the boarded-up window, and screamed as loud as she could, but the run-down neighbourhood was used to screaming women; the only person who paid any attention was Heidnik, and he beat her and threw her down the hole he had dug.
Then he left her with the radio playing rock at top volume.

Two days later – on 29 November – Heidnik added another captive to his harem, a woman called Sandra Lindsay, who was black and mildly retarded.
She had apparently known Heidnik for years, and had even carried his baby – Heidnik had been furious when she had had an abortion.
She told Josefina that she had no idea why her former lover had made her a captive.
She also mentioned the astonishing fact that Heidnik was a bishop in his own church.

The following day Heidnik made her write a note to her mother, telling her that she would be in touch; he mailed this from New York.

The basement was cold, permanently lit by a naked bulb, and covered in litter.
The daily routine consisted of beatings, rapes, oral sex and a prison diet of oatmeal and bread.
No-one in the outside world seemed to know or care where they were.
In fact, Sandra’s mother had reported to the police that she thought her daughter was being held by a man called Gary Heidnik, but a mentally retarded friend of Heidnik’s whom the police questioned mis-spelled the name Heidaike, and when it failed to show up on the police computer – where there were several entries under Heidnik’s name – the search was dropped.

One by one, other captives were introduced to the basement.
On 22 December it was Lisa Thomas, a black high-school dropout who accepted a lift in Heidnik’s Cadillac.
On 1 January 1987 Deborah Dudley was added.
Heidnik was to regret this – Debbie proved to be more argumentative than the other two, and had to be beaten more often.
On 18 January eighteen-year-old Jacqueline Askins, another prostitute, was ‘captured’.
Her ankles were so small that he had to shackle them with handcuffs.
On 23 March he brought his final captive, a twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Agnes Adams; Josefina Rivera – now allowed out of the cellar – had been with him when he picked her up.
By then, two of his captives were dead.
In February, Sandra Lindsay had been suspended from the ceiling by her hands for a week as a punishment for trying to escape from the hole.
On 7 February she died of exhaustion.
On 18 March Heidnik filled the pit with water, made three women – exempting Josefina – climb into it, then tortured them with shocks from a bare electric wire.
It touched Deborah Dudley’s chain and killed her.