The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (40 page)

Because the Birnies pleaded guilty, little evidence about the crimes, or about the psychology of the killers, emerged in court.
Newspaper reporters tried to make up for this by interviewing their relations and acquaintances.
Birnie’s twenty-one-year-old brother James – who had himself been in prison for sex offences – stated that his brother was a violent and romantic man, a complex and contradictory character who often gave his women flowers and chocolates, but who owned a huge pornographic video collection and needed sex six times a day.
During a temporary break-up with his wife, Bernie had forced his brother to permit sodomy.
As a twenty-first birthday present, James was allowed to make love to his brother’s wife.

David Birnie was the oldest of five children; the family had broken up when he was ten, and the children had been placed in institutions.
Birnie’s mother told reporters she had not seen him in years.
The father, a laundry worker, had died the previous year.

Catherine Birnie had also had a lonely and miserable childhood; after her mother’s death she had been sent to live with her grandparents in Perth.
‘People who knew her well said she rarely laughed and had few pleasures.
She never had a playmate and other children were not allowed in her grandparents’ house.’ Her grandmother died in front of the child in the throes of an epileptic fit.

She had known David Birnie since childhood.
When she became pregnant at sixteen, she and Birnie teamed up and went on a crime rampage, breaking into shops and factories.
They were caught and convicted, but Birnie escaped and they committed another string of burglaries.
Again, both were convicted.
When she was released, Catherine Birnie became a domestic help, and married the son of the house; they had six children.
Birnie, in the meantime, had an unsuccessful marriage, and became a jockey; his employment terminated when he tried to attack a woman sexually wearing nothing but a stocking mask.
After sixteen years of marriage, Catherine met Birnie again and began an affair with him.
Two years later, she left her husband, walking out without warning, and went to live with Birnie.
A psychologist who examined her after her arrest said that he had never seen anyone so emotionally dependent on another person.

Birnie’s counsel read a statement in which Birnie said he was extremely sorry for what he had done, and was pleading guilty to spare the victim’s families the ordeal of a trial.
‘He does not wish to present any defence of insanity.
“I knew and understood what I was doing and I knew it was wrong.”’

Their trial, on 3 March 1987, lasted only thirty minutes, and both Birnies were sentenced to life imprisonment.

There is an obvious difference between the Birnie case and the Moors Murders.
Although Myra Hindley was brought up in the home of her grandmother, she had an emotionally secure childhood, and was a well-adjusted teenager.
Yet both women became criminals as a result of becoming emotionally dependent on a man with criminal tendencies.
Both participated willingly in abductions which they knew would lead to rape and murder.
Myra Hindley claimed to have taken no active part in the rapes and murders (although Brady was later to deny this and insist she had participated in both); Catherine Birnie watched with pleasure and even strangled one of the victims.
Yet it seems clear that neither woman would have become involved in crime except under the influence of a high-dominance male.
If we consider again the case of Patty Hearst and the ‘Symbionese Liberation Army’, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘brainwashing’ may be a far more frequent phenomenon than is generally realised.

On 20 June 1955 a fourteen-year-old girl, Patty Ann Cook, was sunbathing on an inflated mattress in her backyard in Rome, Georgia, when a green pick-up truck stopped, and the driver asked directions.
Then he asked her if she would like a lift to the swimming pool, and she accepted eagerly.
A neighbour saw them drive off.
Instead of taking her to the pool, Willie Cochran, an ex-convict in his middle thirties, drove on to a remote logging road, dragged her from the vehicle, and raped her.
After that he shot her through the head, and dropped her in the river, weighted down with a big monkey wrench.
After the girl’s disappearance, Cochran came under suspicion because he was a known sex offender, and drove a green pick-up truck.
Under police questioning, he involved himself in contradictions, and finally confessed to the murder.
Cochran was electrocuted in August 1955.
The case is made memorable by a remark made by the judge, J.H.
Paschall: ‘The male sexual urge has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves.’ The comment could stand as an epigraph to the history of sex crime.

While it would be a mistake to assume that all serial killers are riven by the kind of resentment that motivated Brady and Gallego, there can be no doubt that all are driven by a sexual urge that ‘has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves’.
We have seen that the combination of a high-dominance, highly sexed male with a medium-dominance and emotionally dependent female can lead to strange examples of partnership in sex crime.
Another widely publicised case of the seventies demonstrates how a combination of a high- and a medium-dominance male can produce the same effect.

In the four months between 18 October 1977 and 17 February 1978 the naked bodies of ten girls were dumped on hillsides in the Los Angeles area.
Newspapers christened the killer ‘the Hillside Strangler’.
In fact, it was known to the police from an early stage that two men were involved; sperm inside the dead women revealed that one of the rapists was a ‘secretor’ (one whose blood group can be determined from his bodily fluids) and one a non-secretor.

The first victim was a black prostitute named Yolanda Washington, who operated around Hollywood Boulevard.
Her naked corpse was found in the Forest Lawn cemetery near Ventura Freeway; she had been strangled with a piece of cloth.
Two weeks later, on 1 November 1977, fifteen-year-old Judy Miller, a runaway, was found in the town of La Crescenta, not far from the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale.
She had been raped vaginally and anally, then strangled, and marks on her wrists and ankles, and in the area of her mouth, indicated that she had been bound with adhesive tape.
It was not until the last weeks of November, around Thanksgiving, that the police realised that they had an epidemic of sex murders on their hands; seven more strangled corpses were found, tossed casually on hillsides or by the road, as if thrown from a car.
The youngest victims were two schoolgirls, aged twelve and fourteen; the oldest was a twenty-eight-year-old scientology student, Jane King.
The last victim of the Thanksgiving ‘spree’ was eighteen-year-old Lauren Wagner, and burn marks on her palms suggested that she had been tortured before death.

Los Angeles has about seven murders a day, but this number of sex murders in a few weeks was something of a record.
Women became afraid to go out alone at night, and shops ran out of tear gas and Mace (similar to CS gas).
By the time Lauren Wagner’s body was discovered, Los Angeles was in a state of panic.

In this case, at least, they had an important clue.
Lauren Wagner had been abducted as she climbed out of her car in front of her parents’ home.
A neighbour had looked out of her window to see why her dog was barking, and had heard Lauren shout: ‘You won’t get away with this.’ She had then seen two men force the girl into a big dark sedan with a white top, and drive away.
The woman had seen the men clearly; the elder of the two had bushy hair and was ‘Latin-looking’, while the younger one was taller, and had acne scars on his neck.
The following day, her telephone rang, and a voice with a New York accent told her she had better keep quiet or she was as good as dead.

If the police had grasped the significance of this phone call they could have terminated the career of the Hillside Stranglers forthwith, for the only way a man could have obtained a telephone number without knowing the name of the subscriber was through some friend at the telephone exchange.
A check with the Los Angeles exchange would have revealed the identity of one of the stranglers . . .

There would be two more victims.
One was a seventeen-year-old prostitute named Kimberley Diane Martin; on 15 December 1977 her naked body was found sprawled on a vacant lot near City Hall.
A man had telephoned a call-girl agency the evening before and requested a blonde in black underwear to be sent to the Tamarind Apartment building in Hollywood; Kimberley Martin was despatched, and disappeared.

On 17 February 1978 someone reported seeing an orange car halfway down a cliff on the Angeles Crest Highway.
The boot proved to contain another naked body, that of twenty-year-old Cindy Hudspeth, a student and part-time waitress; she had been raped and sodomised by two men.
After this, the Hillside murders ceased.

Almost a year later, on 12 January 1979, the police chief of Bellingham, a small coastal town in Washington State, was notified that two students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were missing.
On the previous evening, Karen Mandic had told her boyfriend that she had been offered $100 by a security supervisor named Ken Bianchi to do a ‘house-sitting’ job – to spend an evening in an empty house while its security alarm was repaired.

Bianchi was a personable young man from Los Angeles, and he had been in Bellingham since the previous May.
He was known to be an affectionate husband and father, and a conscientious worker; it seemed unlikely that he had anything to do with the disappearance of the two girls.
In fact, he denied knowing them.
Later that day, the bodies of the girls were found in the rear seat of Karen Mandic’s car, parked in a cul-de-sac.

Kenneth Bianchi was immediately picked up.
His air of bewilderment seemed so genuine that the police were convinced they had the wrong man.
His common-law wife Kelli Boyd, who had recently borne his child, was equally certain that Bianchi was incapable of murder.
When Bianchi’s home was searched, and the police found stolen property in his basement, it became apparent that he was not as honest as everyone had assumed.
Medical evidence left no doubt that he was the murderer.
Both girls had semen stains on their underwear; so did Bianchi.
Diane Wilder had been menstruating, and Bianchi had menstrual stains on his underwear.
On the stairs leading down to the basement of the empty house, police found a pubic hair identical to Bianchi’s.
Carpet fibres on the clothes of the dead girls corresponded to the carpet in the basement of the house.
What had happened became clear.
Bianchi had offered Karen Mandic the ‘house-sitting job’.
When she had arrived, he made some excuse to take her in alone – probably to turn on the electricity.
As she preceded him to the basement, he strangled her with a ligature – the angle of the marks on her throat showed that the killer was standing above and behind her.
Then he went out and got Diane Wilder.
When both girls were dead he had completed some kind of sexual assault – no semen was found inside them – then placed them in Karen’s car and driven it away.
Both girls had been sworn to silence about the house-sitting job, ‘for security reasons’, and he had no idea that Diane had told her boyfriend where she was going.

When Sergeant Frank Salerno, a detective on the Hillside Strangler case, heard of Bianchi’s arrest, he hurried to Bellingham.
Bianchi sounded like the tall, acne-scarred young man seen outside Lauren Wagner’s home, and his cousin Angelo Buono, who lived in Glendale, Los Angeles, sounded exactly like the other – the bushy-haired, Latin-looking man.
Buono was a highly unsavoury character.
He had been married four times, but all his wives had left him because of his brutality – when one of them had refused him sex, he had sodomised her in front of the children.
He had also been a pimp, forcing girls into white slavery – and Bianchi had been his partner.
He was an obvious suspect as the second Hillside Strangler.

At this point a strange and interesting development occurred.
Bianchi’s lawyer had been impressed by his apparent sincerity in denying that he knew anything about the murders; so was a psychiatric social worker.
They sent for Professor John G.
Watkins of the University of Montana, and suggested to him that Bianchi might be suffering from the same problem as Billy Milligan (
see here
) – multiple personality.
Watkins placed Bianchi under hypnosis, and within minutes, Bianchi was speaking in a strange, low voice, and introducing himself as someone called Steve.
Steve seemed be an unpleasant, violent character with a sneering laugh, and he declared that he hated ‘Ken’ and had done his best to ‘fix him’.
Then he described how, one evening in 1977, Ken Bianchi had walked into his cousin’s home, and found Angelo murdering a girl.
Steve had then taken over Ken’s body, and become Buono’s willing accomplice in the Hillside Stranglings . . .

Suddenly, it began to look as if there was no chance of convicting either Bianchi or Buono for the murders.
If Bianchi was ‘insane’, then he could not be convicted, and he could not testify against his cousin in court.
Another psychiatrist, Ralph B.
Allison, the author of a classic on multiple personality called
Minds in Many Pieces
, also interviewed Bianchi and agreed that he was a genuine ‘MPD’.
Soon after the arrests, there was even a book written about the case,
The Hillside Strangler
by Ted Schwarz, which accepted that Bianchi was a multiple personality.

At this point, the prosecution decided to call in their own expert, Dr Martin T.
Orne.
A simple experiment quickly convinced Orne that Bianchi was faking.
Good hypnotic subjects can be made to hallucinate the presence of another person.
Orne hypnotised Bianchi and told him that his lawyer, Dean Brett, was sitting in an empty chair.
Bianchi immediately did something that Orne had never seen before in a hypnotised subject – leaned forward and shook the invisible lawyer warmly by the hand.
In Orne’s experience, a truly hypnotised person never tries to touch the hallucination.
Orne also felt that Bianchi overplayed the situation, saying ‘Surely you can see him?’ A subject who genuinely ‘saw’ his lawyer would assume that everyone else did too.
Bianchi was clearly faking hypnosis.
Was he also faking multiple personality?