The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (44 page)

Perhaps the most important single factor in turning Bundy into a serial killer was a relationship with a fellow student named Stephanie Brooks.
Bundy fell in love with her in his late teens; she was beautiful, sophisticated and came of a wealthy family.
To impress her he went to Stanford University to study Chinese; but he was lonely, emotionally immature, and his grades were poor.
‘I found myself thinking of standards of success that I didn’t seem to be living up to.’ Stephanie wearied of his immaturity and dropped him.
He was shattered and deeply resentful.
His brother later commented: ‘Stephanie screwed him up . . .
I’d never seen him like this before.’ One consequence of the emotional upset was that Bundy returned to thieving on a regular basis; he began shoplifting and stealing for ‘thrills’.
On one occasion he even stole a large potted plant from someone’s garden, and drove off with it sticking through the open roof of his car.

He formed a relationship with a young divorcee, Meg Anders, and became a full-time volunteer for the black republican candidate for governor.
He also found a job working for the Crime Commission and Department of Justice Planning – other males in the office envied his confidence, charm and good looks.
When Stephanie Brooks met him again seven years after dropping him, she was so impressed by the new and high-powered Ted that she agreed to marry him – they spent Christmas of 1973 together.
Bundy’s object, however, was not to win her back but to get his revenge for the earlier humiliation.
When, in the new year, she rang him to ask why he had not contacted her since their weekend together, he said coldly: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ and hung up on her.
Then, as if his ‘revenge’ had somehow broken an inner dam and inspired him with a sense of ruthless power and confidence, he committed his first murder.

The vital clue to Bundy lies in a comment made by his friend Ann Rule, a Seattle journalist, in her book
The Stranger Beside Me.
She remarks that he became violently upset if he telephoned Meg Anders – his long-time girlfriend in Seattle – from Salt Lake City, and got no reply.
‘Strangely, while he was being continually unfaithful himself, he expected – demanded – that she be totally loyal to him.’ This is one of the basic characteristics of a type of person who has been labelled ‘the Right Man’ or ‘the Violent Man’.

The insight came to the science-fiction writer A.E.
van Vogt in 1954, when he was preparing to write a novel about a Chinese prison camp run by an authoritarian dictator figure.
It struck van Vogt that what dictators seem to have in common is a total and irrational conviction of their own ‘rightness’, and of the stupidity and wrong-headedness of anyone who opposes them.
It is, in fact, the ‘Roman emperor’ syndrome noted at the beginning of this chapter.
All children regard themselves as the centre of the universe; but if they maintain this attitude beyond early childhood, we regard them as thoroughly obnoxious.
Emperors like Caligula and Nero maintained the attitude into adulthood – because no-one had the courage to gainsay them – and their cruelties were less the result of sadism than of total self-centredness.

The ‘Roman emperor’ syndrome arises out of the natural need of all human beings for some degree of self-esteem and self-confidence.
Self-confidence means the ability to stick to our own aims and beliefs in the face of opposition.
It is as necessary to nursery schoolchildren as to millionaire businessmen.
Once most of us have established what we regard as a comfortable degree of self-confidence – that is, adequate to our everyday needs – we turn our attention to other matters: schoolwork, making a living, etc.
For various reasons, some people fail to achieve this ‘comfortable’ level, perhaps because some early trauma has permanently undermined them, perhaps because they are surrounded by people whose respect they totally fail to win.
Low-dominance people are inclined to accept their rather poor self-image; high-dominance people may develop a lifelong craving for the respect of others.

Again, some of these people may develop into ‘achievers’ – even such dubious achievers as Hitler and Stalin.
Others may simply become remarkable for the size of their egos.
Others become boasters and liars.
Van Vogt noted that a certain percentage of these people achieve a sense of security in a peculiar manner: they marry, produce a family, and then behave exactly like a dictator, treating their wife and children as their subjects.
Not even the slightest hint of contradiction is allowed.
The personality of such a man (or woman) is totally non-flexible.
In no circumstances will he ever admit that he is in the wrong, or has made a mistake.
If evidence that he is in the wrong is placed so firmly under his nose that he can no longer ignore it, he is likely to explode into violence.
This is why van Vogt christened him ‘the Violent Man’ or ‘the Right Man’.

Van Vogt began by studying newspaper accounts of divorce proceedings, and noting how often husbands could treat their wives – and children – with appalling irrationality, flying into a rage at the least sign of opposition, and yet expecting to be allowed to do exactly as they liked.
One such man, a commercial traveller, had an endless series of affairs (these being an important prop to his self-esteem), yet would knock his wife down if she so much as smiled at another man.
Oddly enough, most such men seem to their colleagues at work to be perfectly normal; the Right Man never tries to indulge his power fantasies with his superiors or equals.

He is, of course, living in a kind of sand castle, and it can be destroyed if his wife has the courage to kick it down – that is, to leave him.
Van Vogt noted that in such cases – when the ‘worm turned’ – the husband would often experience total psychological collapse, sometimes resulting in suicide.
His security is built upon a fabric of self-delusion, and he has become skilled in refusing to face this fact.
If it is no longer possible to avoid facing it, he feels that the foundation of his life has been swept away.

Bundy was good-looking and intelligent; but he was a late developer, and early frustrations and disappointments seem to have convinced him that he was a ‘loser’.
This may be deduced from his compulsive thieving – potential ‘winners’ are too concerned with their future to risk being labelled a criminal.
Bundy’s stealing became a compulsion after Stephanie Brooks had ‘dumped’ him; it obviously contained mildly suicidal elements, the feeling that ‘Nothing matters any more’.
In spite of his intelligence he was a poor student, and his grades were usually Bs.
The tide began to turn when he worked for the Justice Department and the Republican candidate, but by that time he was already a compulsive Peeping Tom.
‘Revenge’ on Stephanie Brooks also came too late; it only served to rationalise his feeling that all women were bitches and deserved to be raped.
The Right Man can justify any action that he wants to take, no matter how immoral.
Most of the cases van Vogt observed involved Right Men ‘cheating’ compulsively on their wives.
Bundy went several steps further and became a compulsive rapist and killer as he had become a compulsive thief.

As soon as we understand this curious mechanism of self-deception, we can see that it seems to apply to most serial killers.
Angelo Buono was another ‘Right Man’, a man who was capable of sodomising his wife in front of the children to ‘teach her a lesson’.
When one of his prostitutes ran away, it was the kind of ‘desertion’ that all Right Men fear.
When his threatening phone calls led to humiliation at the hands of an outsize Hell’s Angel, all his outraged self-esteem became directed – with typical irrationality – against women.
Murdering women and dumping them like trash on hillsides restored his macho self-image.
There was no reason to chant ‘Die, cunt, die’ as he sat on Lissa Kastin’s legs and watched Bianchi strangling her; she had never done anything to merit his hatred.
But the Right Man was murdering and humiliating
all
women.

Similarly, the Right Man syndrome can be seen to be the key to Cameron Hooker, Melvin Rees, Harvey Carignan, Gary Heidnik, Gerald Gallego, David Birnie, Douglas Clark and Ian Brady.
Heidnik’s collapse into insanity when his Filipino wife walked out on him is typical of the Violent Man.
So is Heinrich Pommerencke’s sudden decision that all women deserved to die.
The same applies to cases of
folie à deux
, like the Moors Murder case.
For Ian Brady, Myra Hindley was the equivalent of the Right Man’s family – a kind of little dictator state, which enables him to indulge his power fantasies.
When the sense of power-starvation is so overwhelming, the appetite increases with feeding, the starved ego swells like a balloon.

It should now be clear that the Right Man syndrome is a form of mild insanity, allied to that of a madman who believes he is Napoleon.
It cannot be described as true insanity because it does not involve psychotic delusions.
(Fish, for example, was not a Right Man; he was genuinely insane.) Gary Heidnik occupies a blurred space between the Right Man syndrome and genuine psychosis; it is almost impossible to say how far he was insane, and how far he was merely suffering from the Right Man’s delusions of power and grandeur.
The Right Man syndrome, in its most primitive form, is simply a desire to behave like a spoilt child, to punish those who refuse to do what the child demands.
Robert Hansen and Douglas Clark are examples of this stage: they only killed girls who failed to bring them to orgasm.

It is easy to understand the development of the syndrome.
There is nobody in the world who does not want ‘his own way’.
Most of us learn to make realistic adjustments to not getting our own way.
This is obviously easier for someone whose life is fairly stable.
Children with serious problems – difficult parents, broken homes, traumatic frustrations – tend to react to disappointments with an out-of-proportion sense of misery and defeat.
They compensate by fantasy, and perhaps (like Bundy) by lying and stealing.
These reactions have an identical root; both are attempts to take what the world refuses to give freely.
If this ‘naughty boy’ aspect goes unpunished (as with Bundy) it can develop into a kind of self-indulgence that strikes us as insane, but which is actually a calculated and conscious form of wickedness.

This type of serial killer is epitomised by Dean Corll, the homosexual mass murderer of the 1970s.
Corll, like most serial killers, had a difficult childhood, with a father ‘who did not like children’, and the parents eventually divorced.
Meanwhile, Dean (born 1939) had become a mother’s boy.
His mother started a candy company which was to provide her sons with a living.
In 1968, on the advice of a psychic, she moved away from Houson, and left Dean, who was then in his late twenties, on his own.
Life was easy; he smoked pot, sniffed glue – although he had a heart condition – and made advances to young boys.
When he turned thirty, he became thin-skinned and secretive about his age.
His former friends noticed that he became moody; he preferred the companionship of a number of teenage juvenile delinquents.
These included Elmer Wayne Henley, a child of a broken home, and David Brooks.
The latter, a convicted thief and something of a sadist, had on one occasion been knocked unconscious by Corll, tied to a bed, and repeatedly sodomised; nevertheless, he and Corll remained friends.
He had introduced Henley to Corll.
With the aid of his two friends, Corll began luring teenage boys to the house, then raping and killing them, often after various forms of torture, such as biting the genitals.

The first killing took place in 1970, when Corll murdered a hitchhiking student named Jeffrey Konen.
Most of the other victims came from the run-down Heights area of Houston.
Corll’s usual method was to wait until they were unconscious from glue-sniffing, then to chain them to a board and sodomise them, sometimes for days, before strangling them with a rope.
In December 1970 he murdered two boys – James Glass, fourteen, and Danny Yates, fifteen – at the same time.
Two brothers – Donald and Jerry Waldrop – were killed in January 1971.
Between 1970 and 1973, Corll murdered twenty-nine boys, with the aid of Brooks and Henley.
(Brooks seemed to enjoy causing pain, and on one occasion, shot a boy after inserting the barrel of the revolver up his nose.) Most of the bodies were buried in a rented boatshed, wrapped in plastic sheeting.
The youngest victim was a nine-year-old boy who lived in a shop opposite Corll’s apartment.

The end came on the morning of 8 August 1973.
Henley had arrived at a glue-sniffing party with another youth and a fifteen-year-old girl.
Corll was furious about the girl – ‘You’ve spoilt it all’ – and Henley woke up to find himself tied and handcuffed, and the vindictive Corll standing over him with a gun.
‘I’ll teach you a lesson.’ Finally, by offering to help rape and torture the other two, Henley succeeded in persuading Corll to release him.
The two semiconscious teenagers were then undressed and chained up.
Henley tried to rape the girl, but failed.
Corll was in the process of raping the youth when Henley said: ‘Why don’t you let me take the chick outa here?
She don’t want to see that.’ When Corll ignored him, Henley grabbed the gun and ordered him to stop; Corll taunted him: ‘Go on, kill me.’ Henley fired repeatedly, and Corll collapsed.
Henley then rang the police and informed them: ‘I’ve just killed a man.’ When the police arrived, Henley told them the story of the attempted rapes and the shooting, and added that Corll had boasted of having killed other boys and burying them in a boatshed.
In the boatshed in south Houston, police uncovered seventeen bodies, then Henley led them to sites where another ten were buried.
Henley’s estimate was that Corll had murdered thirty-one boys.

Henley’s knowledge of the burial sites made it clear that he was not as innocent as he pretended; eventually, both he and David Brooks were sentenced to life imprisonment.

One of the most widely published photographs of Corll, as an adult, shows him clutching a teddy bear.
Jack Olsen’s book on the case,
The Man With the Candy
, makes it clear that Corll never grew up.
The murders were simply the expression of a kind of ‘spoiltness’, a desire to have his own way.