The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (36 page)

DeSalvo never suceeded in overcoming his feeling of guilt.
He intimidated the tenth victim, twenty-three-year-old Beverly Sams, with a knife; she made him promise not to rape her, because she was afraid of pregnancy.
When he had her lying on the bed, DeSalvo decided to gag her.
‘Then I thought that I wouldn’t want a broad like that, with her stupid ideas to see me, so I tied a blindfold over her eyes.’ When she recovered consciousness and discovered that he was raping her, she called him an animal.
This enraged him enough to make him stab her.
When he could kill like this – giving rein to his resentment – he experienced no guilt.

The last victim, Mary Sullivan, tried to reason with him, to talk him out of rape.
Her words struck home.
‘I recall thinking at the time, yes, she is right, I don’t have to do these things any more now . . .
I heard what this girl is saying and it stayed with me.’ At the time he was angry, and hit her several times.
As he tied her up and prepared to rape her, he realised ‘I would never be able to do it again’.
After raping her, he strangled her manually, while she struggled to get up.
‘This is what I don’t like to talk about.
This is killing me even to talk about.’ After death, her face looked ‘surprised and even disappointed with the way I had treated her’.
Then DeSalvo propped her up against the head of the bed, straddled her chest, and masturbated so that the sperm would strike her face.
‘She is sitting there with the stuff on her nose and mouth and chin.
I am not in control of myself.
I know that something awful has been done, that the whole world of human beings are shocked and will be even more shocked.’ He went into the kitchen and fetched a broom, then inserted it into her vagina, ‘not so far as to hurt her . . .
you say it is funny that I worry about hurting her when she is already dead, but that is the truth . . .
I do not want to hurt her’.
And, after leaving the apartment; ‘as far as I was concerned it wasn’t me.
I can’t explain it to you any other way.’ When Brussel later pressed him to explain why Mary Sullivan was his final victim, he admitted that she had reminded him of his daughter.
Dr Jekyll was back in control.

That he would now remain in control was demonstrated in a sensational manner.
In February 1967, a month after being sentenced to life imprisonment, DeSalvo and two more inmates escaped from the Bridgewater mental institution.
The city of Boston was plunged into panic.
Interviewed by the press, Brussel was unconcerned.
He pointed out that DeSalvo had left a note behind, apologising for taking unauthorised leave, and explaining that he was only doing so to draw attention to the fact that he was receiving no psychiatric treatment.
He promised that he would harm nobody.
Brussel stated that he was sure DeSalvo would honour his promise.
In fact, DeSalvo gave himself up after only thirty-six hours.
His protest failed in its purpose – he was transferred to the virtually escape-proof Walpole Prison, but still failed to receive any psychiatric treatment.

At least Brussel had proved his point.
The Boston Strangler had raped and murdered his way to a kind of maturity.

Six

Folie à Deux

SOON AFTER MIDNIGHT
on Sunday 2 November 1980 a young couple emerged from a restaurant in Sacramento, California, and walked towards their car.
They had spent the evening at a Founder’s Day dance in the restaurant, and were wearing formal evening dress.
On their way through the car park, they were accosted by a pretty blonde girl whose swollen stomach suggested an advanced stage of pregnancy.
As they stopped politely to find out what she wanted, the girl pointed an automatic pistol at them, and ordered them to climb into the back seat of an Oldsmobile.
The front passenger seat was occupied by a big man with a sullen expression.

At that moment, a student who happened to know the young couple – and who was in the mood for a practical joke – decided to climb into the driver’s seat of the Oldsmobile, as if about to drive away.
His position prevented him from seeing the gun in the hand of the sullen-faced man, but a glance at the face of his friends told him something was wrong.
A moment later, he was startled when the pretty blonde screamed: ‘What the fuck are you doing in my car?’ and slapped his face.
As he watched her drive away with a squeal of tyres, Andy Beal had the presence of mind to concentrate on the numberplate of the speeding car, and to write it down on a piece of paper.
Then he hurried to the nearest telephone and rang the police.
When the registration number was fed into the motor vehicle computer it revealed that the car was registered to twenty-four-year-old Charlene Williams, with an address in Sacramento.

The abducted couple were twenty-two-year-old Craig Miller and Beth Sowers, twenty-one, and when, the next morning, the police went to call on Charlene Williams at the home of her parents, Chuck and Mercedes, they were still missing.
The attractive girl who opened the door to the policemen acknowledged that she was the owner of the Oldsmobile, but denied any knowledge of the kidnapping.
She explained that she had been drunk the night before, and that her memory was hazy.
But she insisted that she had spent the evening alone.
It was after they had left Charlene Williams that the officers learned that Craig Miller had been found in adjoining Eldorado County; he was lying face down, with three bullets in the back of his head.
By the time the police returned to Charlene’s residence, the Oldsmobile had gone, and so had Charlene.
As the police looked into her background, they soon had reason to believe that she had been accompanied by her thirty-four-year-old ‘husband’ Gerald Armand Gallego, who had a lengthy record which included three years in jail for armed robbery.

The couple had left in a hurry, and so were unprepared for a long flight.
Two weeks later, Charlene contacted her parents and asked them to wire five hundred dollars.
When she went to collect it at a Western Union office in Omaha, Nebraska, police were waiting for her.
Her ‘husband’ was also taken into custody.
Five days later, on 22 November 1980, the body of Beth Sowers was found in a field in Placer County.
Her evening gown was badly torn, and she had been shot three times in the back of the head.
Medical examination revealed that she had been raped.

By the time Gerald Gallego was in custody, the Sacramento police had learned a great deal about him, and it suggested that he was a multiple sex killer.
Heredity may have played some part in his makeup – his father had been executed for three murders in 1955, at the age of twenty-eight.
Gerald was unaware of this when he had his first encounters with the law, at the age of ten.
When he was thirteen, he was sentenced to a period in a youth penal facility for having sexual relations with a seven-year-old girl.
He married at the age of eighteen, and his first wife bore him a daughter, Sally Jo.
By the time he was thirty-two he had been married seven times.
He had also been committing incest with his daughter since she was eight.
Then, when she was fourteen, he sodomised her and raped her girlfriend.
The teenagers went to the Butte County police, and Gallego was forced to flee.

By this time – 1978 – Gallego had already known Charlene for a year.
A quiet, shy girl, she was the only daughter of a wealthy Sacramento businessman, and had led a pampered existence.
At college she had become acquainted with drugs and sex and, by the time she was twenty-one, she had been married and divorced twice.
She had met Gerald Gallego on a blind date, and was fascinated by his air of macho brutality, and his need for violence during sex.
They lived together for a while, then married in 1978.
(In fact they were not legally married, since Gallego had omitted to get a divorce from a previous wife.) Charlene was not only aware of his criminal record, but of his intense fantasy life.
Gallego confided that his greatest desire was for the ‘perfect sex slave’ – preferably a teenage virgin – whom he could hold captive and order to fulfil his demands, which included oral sex and sodomy.
As Charlene later confessed, she had agreed to help him in his quest.

On 11 September 1978 they had driven to a shopping mall in Sacramento, and Charlene had accosted two young girls, Rhonda Scheffler, seventeen, and her sixteen-year-old friend Kippi Vaught.
She lured them back to the Oldsmobile with the suggestion that they might like to smoke some marijuana.
Once there, they were forced into the back of the van – which had been fitted with a mattress – and Gallego was able to put into operation his fantasy of rape, while Charlene sat in the front of the van.
The girls were then driven to a site fifteen miles east of Sacramento, where both were ‘executed’ with three bullets in the head, and their bodies dumped.

Gerald and Charlene Gallego soon became highly efficient killers.
The next victims, nine months later, were a fourteen-and a fifteen-year-old girl, Kaye Colley and Brenda Judd, picked up at the annual county fair in Reno on 24 June 1979; their bodies have never been found, although according to Charlene Gallego they are in a shallow grave near Lovelock, Nevada.

Ten months later, on 24 April 1980, two seventeen-year-olds, Stacy Ann Redican and Karen Chipman-Twiggs, were abducted from a Sacramento shopping mall; their decomposed bodies were found near Lovelock, Nevada, in July 1980.
They had been killed by hammer blows to the skull.

Linda Teresa Aguilar was five months pregnant when she disappeared somewhere between Port Orford, Oregon, and nearby Gold Beach on 6 June 1980, less than three months after the two previous victims had vanished.
Her body was found three weeks later in a grave nine miles south of Gold Beach; she was bound with a nylon rope, and beaten with a blunt instrument; sand in her windpipe revealed that she had been buried alive.

Five weeks later, on 17 July 1980, a thirty-four-year-old Sacramento waitress, Virginia Mochel, vanished after she walked out of the tavern where she worked.
Police learned that she had been talking to a married couple in the tavern: a man who was drunk and boisterous, and a pretty but subdued girl.
Her naked body was discovered in October near Sacramento, the hands tied behind her with fishing line.

It was in the following month that Gerald and Charlene Gallego waited in the car park outside the Carousel restaurant in Sacramento, and Gallego saw a pretty girl in evening dress whom he decided he wanted to possess.
Beth Sowers was with her fiance, Craig Miller, but that made no difference.
Charlene forced them into the van at gunpoint, Miller was despatched a few miles away, then Beth Sowers was taken back to Gallego’s apartment and dragged into the bedroom.
In the next room, Charlene Gallego listened to her cries and pleas as she was made to cater to Gallego’s perverted sexual demands.
Then the crying girl was dragged out of the bedroom and thrown back into the van, to be taken to her place of execution.
After that, Charlene dropped Gallego off at his flat, and went back to the home of her parents, where she lived.
The next morning the police arrived – the prompt action of the student who had taken her registration number had finally put an end to the killing spree.

Gallego proved to be a difficult prisoner; he had always had a reputation for aggression, and during his previous jail term had told a prison counsellor: ‘The only thing that interests me is killing God.’ Now, at the arraignment, he leapt to his feet and screamed at reporters: ‘Get the hell out of here!
We’re not funny people.
We’re not animals.’ He fought violently, overturning tables and chairs, before he was subdued.

Charlene Gallego was at first unco-operative, but was eventually persuaded to enter into plea-bargaining in exchange for testifying against her ‘husband’.
Her story made it clear that she had also been Gallego’s ‘sex slave’; she explained that she needed the emotional security he provided.
This is why she felt she had to comply with his demand for help in kidnapping more ‘sex slaves’.
Her husband, she said, had pursued his aim of the ‘perfect love slave’ obsessively, even rating his victims on their performances.

On 21 June 1983 Gallego was sentenced to die by lethal injection.
In accordance with her plea bargain, Charlene Gallego received sixteen years in jail.

Before the 1960s, cases of ‘duo’ sex murder in which one of the participants was a woman were unknown.
The reason is obvious; more than any other criminal, the sex criminal tends to work alone and to take no-one else into his confidence.
A 1980 FBI report on lust killers states: ‘The disorganised asocial lust murderer exhibits primary characteristics of social aversion.
This individual prefers his own company to that of others and would be typified as a loner.’ This applies to most sex killers from Jack the Ripper to Heinrich Pommerencke.
Such men may even be married – like the Düsseldorf murderer Peter Kürten or the Boston Strangler – but their wives seldom suspect that their husbands are sex killers.
The very idea of a wife helping her husband to rape another woman seems absurd.
So why is it that such cases began to appear in the 1960s, and that their number has continued to increase?
It can hardly be unrelated to the fact that the 1960s also saw the emergence of the ‘self-esteem’ killer.
In fact, as the Gallego case makes clear, ‘duo’ sex crimes
are
crimes of self-esteem.
As agent Robert Hazelwood observed: ‘Sexual assault services non-sexual needs – power needs.’ This is not invariably true – or at least, it used not to be true.
Robert Poulin’s craving for a woman was simply a desire to lose his virginity, to ‘fuck some girl’; the same is true of Heinrich Pommerencke.
They were like starving men who steal food.
The archetypal sex criminal was described by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil in
The Man Without Qualities
(1930-43).
Moosbrugger is arresting for stabbing a prostitute to death.
Musil writes:

‘As a boy, Moosbrugger had been a poverty-stricken wretch, a shepherd-lad in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street; and he was so poor that he never spoke to a girl.
Girls were something that he could only look at . . .
Now one must imagine just what that means.
Something that one craves for, just as naturally as one craves for bread or water, is only there to be looked at.
After a time one’s desire for it becomes unnatural.
It climbs over a stile, becoming visible right up to the knees . . .’