The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (50 page)

Between three hundred and five hundred murders a year sound an alarming total, but it is a long way short of the four or five thousand that has been suggested.
These figures makes it clear that America is not full of maniacal serial killers who wander around and kill hundreds of people over the course of years.
Most of them, as we have seen, commit their crimes
over a fairly brief period and in a restricted area.
The mobile serial killer is the exception, and the VICAP computer means that the chance of catching him has been enormously increased.
Compared with the most frequent type of murder – domestic killings – the number of victims of serial murder remains relatively small.
It is interesting to note that in the decade from 1979 to 1989 – the period during which most of the serial killers in this book committed their crimes – the American murder rate remained stable at around 20,000 a year.
To imply that serial murder is ‘a growing menace’ comparable to AIDS is clearly something of an exaggeration.

What
was
clear, even as early as the 1960s, was that ‘motiveless murder’ constituted a new and baffling type of crime.
Sex crime, as we have seen, was difficult to solve because in most cases there was only a casual connection between the criminal and the victim.
Nevertheless, police were often able to catch serial rapists because a certain pattern was discernible in their crimes.
In 1973, two rapists in Houston, Texas, made a habit of abducting girls who were getting into their cars late at night, driving them to a remote spot, then subjecting them to hours of sexual humiliation before leaving them naked.
After forty rapes and two murders, the police decided to ‘stake out’ every car park in Houston, using vast numbers of men, including civilian volunteers.
On the second night of the stake-out, when the rapists tried to abduct another girl, police heard her scream, and the men were arrested before they could escape.
Michael Ohern, twenty, and Howard Braden, nineteen, both received sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
It was a laborious way of catching rapists, but it worked.
When, on the other hand, a killer who became known as ‘Zodiac’ committed five murders and severely wounded two more victims in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s, a vast police operation failed to trap him because the killings were motiveless and random; his identify remains unknown.

We have seen how the major breakthrough occurred in the mid-1970s, with the setting up of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, with a grant of $128,000 from the National Institute of Justice.
The oldest and most experienced of its agents was Howard Teten, who taught a course in applied criminology; he seemed to have a natural talent for ‘profiling’ criminals.
On one occasion he was able to solve a case over the telephone – the multiple stabbing of a girl in California.
From the frenzy of the attack, Teten judged that it was a sudden impulsive act, and that it sounded like a teenager, a ‘social isolate’, who would be weighed down by guilt and ready to confess.
He advised the police to look in the neighbourhood where the girl was killed.
In fact, when a policeman knocked on a door and was confronted with a skinny teenager, the boy blurted out: ‘You got me.’

We have also seen how, when the police of Platte City, Missouri, were confronted with the sex murder of a schoolgirl, Julie Wittmeyer, in 1977, the Behavioral Science Unit was able to ‘profile’ the killer so accurately that the investigators were immediately able to identify him in their list of suspects.
In the case of the Anchorage killer Robert Hansen, FBI agent Glenn Flothe describes how he telephoned the Unit.
‘I started to tell the guy from the FBI about Hansen and he goes, ‘No, no, no – tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about the guy’.
After describing the crimes, the agent told him that the killer probably was a respected member of the community, and probably stuttered.
‘He basically outlined Robert Hansen.’ Psychological profiling has raised the old-fashioned ‘hunch’ to the level of a science.
In the FBI handbook
Sexual Homicide: Its Patterns and Motives
, it is estimated that psychological profiling has ‘helped focus the investigation in 77 per cent of those cases in which the suspects were subsequently identified’ – a highly satisfying success rate.

Equally important in the investigation of serial murder has been the use of computers.
It was the case of Henry Lee Lucas, in 1983, that made state police forces aware of the need for co-operation; Lucas himself told Sheriff Jim Boutwell that he realised he owed his immunity to lack of co-operation between states.
Computerisation of fingerprinting has also been a major advance.
Los Angeles computerised its fingerprints in 1985, and within the first three minutes of the operation of the new system, it identified a fingerprint lifted from a stolen car as that of a twenty-five-year-old drifter, Richard Ramirez – thus giving an identity to the unknown serial killer so far known only as the ‘Night Stalker’; Ramirez was later sentenced to death for thirteen murders.
Perhaps the most exciting advance of recent years has been the development of ‘DNA fingerprinting’ – the discovery, made by Dr Alec Jeffreys in 1985, that the DNA molecules contained in every single cell of our bodies are almost as individual as a fingerprint, so that a rapist can be identified from his semen, a fragment of skin beneath a victim’s nails, or even a single hair.
It meant that virtually every rapist could be identified from some trace of evidence left on the victim.
Since 1985, the number of ‘random’ sex criminals who have been caught through genetic fingerprinting has continued to increase dramatically, demonstrating that genetic fingerprinting is probably the most important innovation in crime detection since the original discovery of fingerprint classification in the 1890s.

What this book has tried to demonstrate is that the serial killer is a virtually inevitable product of the evolution of our society.
What is happening today could be compared with what happened in Europe in the eighteenth century, when the soaring population rate in the large cities
²
combined with the introduction of a new cheap drink called gin to produce an unparalleled crime explosion.
Cities like London and Paris became vast pestilence-infected slums, and the ‘overcrowded rat’ syndrome proceeded to operate on the human population.
In fact, in these two cities the crime explosion was brought under control with remarkable ease by a new and efficient police force.
As the Industrial Revolution brought more overcrowding – between 1800 and 1900 the population more than doubled – the age of economic crime gave way to the age of sex crime.
In the mid-twentieth century, the age of sex crime merged into a new age of self-esteem crime; and there was an important difference.
Any medium-dominance male might commit rape if he happened to be drunk and sexually frustrated.
As far as we can see, self-esteem crimes are always committed by members of the ‘dominant five per cent’ – and, moreover, by the type van Vogt called Right Men.
(There may be examples of serial killers who are not Right Men or members of the dominant five per cent, but not one has been encountered in this study.) The attitude of the dominant male towards women is always predatory, especially towards non-dominant women.
In Hermann Hesse’s novel
Steppenwolf
– about a lonely ‘outsider’ – a poem written by the hero captures this attitude perfectly:

The lovely creature I would so treasure,

And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,

I would drink of her red blood full measure,

Then howl till the night went by.

In the late nineteenth century there were just as many frustrated, high-dominance working-class males in the world, but poor education and the gap between social classes kept them ‘in their place’.
By the mid-twentieth century increasing literacy and the erosion of class barriers meant that increasing numbers of these males were able to articulate their resentment.
Some of these had the kind of traumatic childhood that seems typical of serial killers – lonely, physically abused, unwanted by parents, accident-prone (often suffering head injuries) and obsessed by sexual fantasies – and the result was bound to be, sooner or later, a sex-crime explosion.
This is what we have witnessed in the last four decades of the twentieth century, and there seems no reason to assume that the early decades of the twenty-first century will show any improvement – on the contrary, it seems inevitable that Europe will follow America into the age of serial murder.
Joel Norris speaks optimistically about the development of ‘profiles that could lead to the development of a diagnostic or prediction instrument’; but although we have seen how psychological profiling can be used to trap serial killers, it seems unlikely that it will ever enable psychiatrists to recognise them in time to prevent them from becoming killers.
The best we can hope is that social changes will eventually remove the conditions that incubate the type.

What this means, unfortunately, is that there is no simple short-term solution to the problem of the serial killer, any more than there has ever been a simple solution to the problem of crime and violence.
The long-term solution, for our descendants of the twenty-first century, would be to attack the basic causes: ‘overcrowded rat’ syndrome, child abuse, social frustration.
We have seen that, so far, all serial killers have emerged from the same social group – the working class or lower middle class – and in that case, the theoretical solution would be to improve social conditions until some of the worst features have disappeared.
Theoretically, a Utopian society with a low birth rate, ample living space and a high general level of prosperity should cease to produce serial killers.
However, until we have learned to control the population explosion, such a society is obviously no more than a pleasant daydream.

Nevertheless, it is worth recalling the story of how the eighteenth century crime explosion in England was brought under control by the novelist Henry Fielding.
When Fielding became a magistrate in 1748, at the age of forty-one, London was swarming with footpads and robber gangs, and the roads were infested with highwaymen.
With no police force except part-time parish constables, the London criminal had never known any organised opposition.
Fielding suggested to Parliament that it should vote him six hundred pounds to try to stop the crime wave and the money was granted.
He next organised a group of parish constables, all of who knew the most notorious thieves by sight.
Victims of robberies were urged to hurry to Fielding’s house in Bow Street, from which ‘thief-takers’ would set out in hot pursuit.
(This is why they became known as Bow Street Runners.) Fielding describes his satisfaction as newspaper reports of robberies diminished day by day, until eventually they ceased altogether.
As the roads surrounding London were patrolled by heavily armed constables on horseback, burglars and highwaymen who were accustomed to immunity hastened to move elsewhere.
In putting a stop to London’s crime wave, Fielding used only half the six hundred pounds.

The lesson – known to every police officer – is that in controlling crime, prevention is better than cure, or at least more immediately effective.
In this respect, the advances in crime detection that have occurred since the 1970s are even more impressive then those of the Bow Street Runners.
In 1986 special agent Roger Depue, then head of the FBI Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit and Administrator of the NCAVC, expressed the new sense of optimism when he declared: ‘The concerted efforts of the US Congress, the Department of Justice and Federal, State and local justice agencies to bring violent crime under control
have
made a difference in America.
They have contributed to slowing the downward spiral, and increasing the risk for the violent offender.
The NCAVC was born out of these national efforts and represents the new feeling in America.
We are not only going to fight back – we are going to win.’

¹
A Criminal History of Mankind
, page 605, Colin Wilson, 1984.

²
Between 1750 and 1800 the population of Europe rose from 147 million to 187 million.

Nine

Update

THE AIM OF
this book has not been to simply retell the histories of known serial killers, but to provide the reader with an understanding of what creates and drives such a predator.
Serial murder is a social aberration that has arisen within the last two hundred years and – thanks to modern forensic policing and behavioural science – might effectively cease to happen within the next generation or so.
Other once universal forms of crime have been driven out of existence by both technology and society’s willingness to combat them creatively; banditry and slavery, to name just two.
So it is not too much to hope that the serial killer might soon go the way of the Viking raider and the Roman gladiator: a gruesome evidence of human cruelty, only to be found in the pages of history books.

Until that happy day, however, there are always new cases to record and old cases to update . . .

Andrei Chikatilo

The Russian Andrei Chikatilo operated throughout the 1980s, mostly around the city of Rostov on Don.
He was able to go on killing for such a long period largely because of the Soviet policy of refusing to give publicity to criminal cases, in a futile effort to convince the world that, compared to the decadent West, Russia was virtually free of crime.
The result was that the citizens of Rostov were unaware that Russia’s worst serial killer was working in their midst, and therefore had no chance to take precautions, or to warn their children about plausible strangers.

Andrei Chikatilo was born in the farming village of Yablochnoye, in the Ukraine, on 6 October 1936.
Ukrainians are an ethnic minority in Russia, and because so many peasants opposed ‘collective farming’, Stalin treated them as his personal enemies; millions died in the starvation of the early 30s.
Chikatilo’s family were very poor and lived in a one-room hut; his parents worked hard in the fields for very little pay.