The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (45 page)

The same also seems to be true of another widely publicised case of mass murder in the 1970s.
Between 1976 and his arrest in December 1978, John Wayne Gacy, a Chicago building contractor, killed thirty-two boys in the course of sexual attacks.
Gacy’s childhood – he was born in 1932 – was in many ways similar to Corll’s, with a harsh father and a protective mother.
He was a lifelong petty thief.
Like Corll, he also suffered from a heart condition.
In childhood, he had been struck on the head by a swing, which caused a bloodclot on the brain, undetected for several years.
He married a girl whose parents owned a fried-chicken business in Waterloo, Iowa, and – again like Corll – became a successful businessman.
(Maslow would point out that this indicates that both belong to the ‘dominant five per cent’.) He was also known as a liar and a boaster.
His marriage came to an end when Gacy was imprisoned for sexually molesting a teenager (although Gacy always claimed he had been framed).
Out of jail, he married a second time and set up in business as a building contractor.
He was successful (although notoriously mean), and was soon regarded as a pillar of the local community – he was even photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the wife of President Jimmy Carter.
His own wife found his violent tempers a strain, and they divorced.

In 1975, while he was still married, one of his teenage employees vanished; it was after this that his wife noticed an unpleasant smell in the house.
After their separation in the following year, Gacy made a habit of picking up teenage homosexuals, or luring teenagers to his house ‘on business’.
handcuffing them, and then committing sodomy.
They were finally strangled, and the bodies disposed of, usually in the crawl space under the house.

In March 1978, a twenty-seven-year-old named Jeffrey Rignall accepted an invitation to smoke pot in Gacy’s Oldsmobile.
Gacy clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over his face, and when Rignall woke up he was being sodomised in Gacy’s home.
Gacy raped him repeatedly and flogged him with a whip; finally, he chloroformed him again and left him in a park.
In hospital, Rignall discovered that he had sustained permanent liver damage from the chloroform.
Since the police were unable to help, he set about trying to track down the rapist himself, sitting near freeway entrances looking for black Oldsmobiles.
Eventually he saw Gacy, followed him, and noted down his number.
Although Gacy was arrested, the evidence against him seemed poor.

On 11 December 1978 Gacy invited a fifteen-year-old boy, Robert Piest, to his house to talk about a summer job.
When the youth failed to return, police tracked down the building contractor who had offered him the job, and questioned him at his home in Des Plaines.
Alerted by the odour, they investigated the crawl space and found fifteen bodies and parts of others.
When Gacy had run out of space, he had started dumping bodies in the river.

Gacy’s story was that he was a ‘dissociated’ personality, and that the murders were committed by an evil part of himself called Jack.
In court, one youth described how Gacy had pulled him up, posing as a police officer, then handcuffed him at gunpoint.
Back in Gacy’s home, he was sodomised, after which Gacy made an attempt to drown him in the bath; but Gacy changed his mind and raped him again.
Then, after holding his head under water until he became unconscious, Gary urinated on him, then played Russian roulette with a gun which turned out to contain only a blank.
Finally, Gacy released him, warning him that the police would not believe his story.
Gacy proved to be right.
The jury who tried him believed a psychiatrist who told them that Gacy was suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder that did not amount to insanity, and on 13 March 1980 John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In cases like these, it seems clear that the answer should not be sought in psychological diagnoses so much as in weakness and self-indulgence.
Although Gacy’s biographer Tim Cahill tries hard to make a case for Gacy as a doom-haunted necrophile (he once worked in a morgue), the psychological evidence shows that both he and Corll were childish and undisciplined personalities in the grip of total selfishness.

The same probably applies to the only British example of a homosexual serial killer, Dennis Nilsen.
Between December 1978 and February 1983, Nilsen murdered fifteen young men whom he had lured to his flat in north London, and got rid of the bodies by dissecting them, boiling the pieces, and disposing of them in various ways – even leaving them in plastic bags for the dustbin men to collect.
On 8 February 1983 a drains maintenance engineer called at a house in Muswell Hill to examine a blocked drain; he found that it contained decaying flesh that looked human.
When Dennis Nilsen, a thirty-seven-year-old employment officer, returned home, he was questioned by the police, and immediately pointed to a wardrobe; inside were two plastic bags containing two severed heads and a skull.

Nilsen insisted that there was no sexual motive in the crimes, but this is hard to believe.
The son of a drunken father and a puritanical mother, he had the kind of lonely childhood that seems typical of serial killers.
His troubles began, according to Nilsen, when he was seven years old, and was taken by his mother to see the corpse of his grandfather – to whom he had been deeply attached.
A necrophiliac obsession began to develop.
After twelve years as an army cook, and a period in London as a policeman and security guard, he obtained work in a job centre in Soho and began living with a man.
It was after this man left in 1977 that Nilsen began to invite young males – picked up in pubs – back to his flat, get them drunk, then strangle them.

Nilsen’s biographer Brian Masters accepted Nilsen’s curious explanation that he was killing out of loneliness – the book is entitled
Killing for Company
– and that having a corpse around the flat gave him a sense of companionship; but since Nilsen admitted that he was a necrophile, this explanation is hard to accept.
What
is
quite clear from Masters’ book is that Nilsen was a man of high dominance; Masters went to see him in prison and reported that Nilsen behaved as if interviewing him for a job.
One of his acquaintances reported: ‘The only off-putting thing about him was his eyes.
They can stare you out, and not many people can stare me out.’ Others found his immense loquacity tiresome; Nilsen regarded himself as an intellectual, and had a high opinion of himself.
This seems to be the most probable explanation of why he turned to murder.
When the man with whom he was living, David Gallichan,
announced that he was leaving – he had been offered a job in the country – he was surprised when Nilsen’s reaction was a cold and highly controlled rage.
‘It was as though I had insulted him, and he wanted me to go immediately.’ This is, of course, the reaction of a Right Man on being abandoned by someone whom he has been accustomed to dominate; the whole foundation of his insecure self-esteem is shaken.
This may also explain why, since his arrest and life imprisonment, Nilsen seems to have taken a certain pride in being ‘Britain’s biggest mass murderer’.

One final important fact must be taken into account: that Nilsen, like Ted Bundy, was an extremely heavy drinker.
He met his victims in pubs, then brought them back home to consume large quantities of vodka.
Alcohol had the same effect on Nilsen and Bundy that drugs had on Dean Corll and on the Manson clan, creating a sense of unreality, a kind of moral vacuum without inhibitions.
In this vacuum, murder meant very little.

Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the serial killer is one that he shares with most other criminals: a tendency to an irrational self-pity that can produce an explosion of violence.
In that sense, Paul John Knowles may be regarded not merely as the archetypal serial killer but as the archetypal criminal.

Knowles, who was born in 1946, had spent an average of six months of every year in jail since he was nineteen, mostly for car thefts and burglaries.
In Florida’s Raiford Penitentiary in 1972 he began to study astrology, and started corresponding with a divorcee named Angela Covic, whom he had contacted through an astrology magazine.
She flew to Florida, was impressed by the gaunt good looks of the tall red-headed convict, and agreed to marry him.
She hired a lawyer to work on his parole, and when he was released on 14 May 1972, Knowles hastened to San Francisco to claim his bride.
She soon had second thoughts; a psychic had told her that she was mixed up with a very dangerous man.
Knowles stayed at her mother’s apartment, but after four days Angela Covic told him she had decided to return to her husband, and gave him his air ticket back to Florida.
We have seen that, when the Violent Man is rejected by a woman, the result is an explosion of rage and self-pity that contains a suicidal component.
Knowles conformed to type; he later claimed that he went out on to the streets of San Francisco and killed three people at random.

Back in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida, on 26 July 1974 Knowles got into a fight in a bar and was locked up for the night.
He escaped, broke into the home of a sixty-five-year-old teacher, Alice Curtis, and stole her money and her car.
He rammed a gag too far down her throat and she suffocated.
A few days later, as he parked the stolen car, he noticed two children looking at him as if they recognised him – their mother was, in fact, a friend of his family.
He forced them into the car and drove away.
The bodies of seven-year-old Mylette Anderson and her eleven-year-old sister Lillian were later found in a swamp.

What followed was a totally unmotivated murder rampage, as if Knowles had simply decided to kill as many people as he could before he was caught.
The following day, 2 August 1974, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, he broke into the home of Marjorie Howie, forty-nine, and strangled her with a stocking; he stole her television set.
A few days later he strangled and raped a teenage runaway who hitched a lift with him.
On 23 August he strangled Kathie Pierce in Musella, Georgia, while her three-year-old son looked on; Knowles left the child unharmed.
On 3 September near Lima, Ohio, he had several drinks with an accounts executive named William Bates, and later strangled him, driving off in the dead man’s white Impala.
After driving to California, Seattle and Utah (using Bates’s credit cards) he forced his way into a caravan in Ely, Nevada, on 18 September 1974, and shot to death an elderly couple, Emmett and Lois Johnson.
On 21 September he strangled and raped forty-two-year-old Mrs Charlynn Hicks, who had stopped to admire the view beside the road near Sequin, Texas.
On 23 September, in Birmingham, Alabama, he met an attractive woman named Ann Dawson, who owned a beauty shop, and they travelled around together for the next six days, living off her money; she was murdered on 29 September.
For the next sixteen days he drove around without apparently committing any further murders; but on 16 October he rang the doorbell of a house in Marlborough, Connecticut; it was answered by sixteen-year-old Dawn White, who was expecting a friend.
Knowles forced her up to the bedroom and raped her; when her mother, Karen White, returned home, he raped her too, then strangled them both with silk stockings, leaving with a tape recorder and Dawn White’s collection of rock records.
Two days later, he knocked on the door of fifty-three year old Doris Hovey in Woodford, Virginia, and told her he needed a gun and would not harm her; she gave him a rifle belonging to her husband, and he shot her through the head and left, leaving the rifle beside her body.

In Key West, Florida, he picked up two hitchhikers, intending to kill them, but was stopped by a policeman for pulling up on a kerb; when the policeman asked to see his documents, Knowles expected to be arrested; but the officer failed to check that he was the owner of the car, and let him drive away.

On 2 November Knowles picked up two hitchhikers, Edward Hilliard and Debbie Griffin; Hilliard’s body was later discovered in woods near Macon, Georgia; the girl’s body was never found.

On 6 November, in a gay bar in Macon, he met a man named Carswell Carr and went home with him.
Later that evening, Carr’s fifteen-year-old daughter Mandy heard shouting and went downstairs, to find Knowles standing over the body of her father, who was tied up.
It emerged later that Carr had died of a heart attack; Knowles had been torturing him by stabbing him all over with a pair of scissors.
He then raped Mandy Carr – or attempted it (no sperm was found in the vagina) and strangled her with a stocking.
The bodies were found when Carr’s wife, a night nurse, returned home.

The following day, in a Holiday Inn in downtown Atlanta, Knowles saw an attractive redhead in the bar – a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes.
She went for a meal with him and they ended up in her bedroom, but he proved impotent, in spite of all her efforts.
He had introduced himself to her as Daryl Golden, son of a New Mexico restaurant owner, and the two of them got on well enough for her to accept his offer to drive her to Miami.
On the way there, he hinted that he was on the run for some serious crime – or crimes – and told her that he had a premonition that he was going to be killed some time soon.
He also told her that he had tape-recorded his confession, and left it with his lawyer in Miami, Sheldon Yavitz.
In another motel, he finally succeeded in entering her, after first practising cunnilingus and masturbating himself into a state of excitement.
Even so, he failed to achieve orgasm; she concluded that he was incapable of it.

Long before they separated – after a mere six days together – she was anxious to get rid of him.
She had sensed the underlying violence, self-pity, lack of discipline.
He pressed hard for another night together; she firmly refused, insisting that it would only make the parting more difficult.
He waited outside her Miami motel half the night, while she deliberately stayed away; finally, he gave up and left.

The following day, she was asked to go to the police station, and there for the first time realised what kind of a man she had been travelling with.
On the morning after their separation ‘Daryl Golden’ had driven to the house of some journalists to whom he had been introduced four days earlier, and offered to drive Susan Mackenzie to the hairdresser.
Instead, he took the wrong turning, and told her that he wanted to have sex with her, and would not hurt her if she complied.
When he stopped the car and pointed a gun at her, she succeeded in jumping out and waved frantically at a passing car.
Knowles drove off.
Later, alerted to the attempted rape, a squad car tried to stop Knowles, but he pointed a shotgun at the policeman and drove off.