The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (52 page)

Now the younger brother Konerak found himself in the same apartment.
He was also given drugged coffee, and then, when he was unconscious, stripped and raped.
After that, Dahmer went out to buy some beer.
On his way back to the apartment, Dahmer saw, to his horror, that his naked victim was talking to two black teenage girls, obviously begging for help.
Dahmer hurried up and tried to grab the boy, but the girls clung on to him.
One of them succeeded in ringing the police, and two squad cars arrived within minutes.
Three irritable police officers wanted to know what the trouble was about.

When Dahmer told them that the young man was his lover, that they lived together in the nearby apartments, and that they had merely had a quarrel, the policemen were inclined to believe him because he looked sober and Konerak looked drunk.
So they left the youth in Dahmer’s apartment – to be strangled, violated and dismembered.

When Dahmer was released from the correctional centre in March 1990 – where he was serving his sentence for the assault on the elder Sinthasomphone brother – he had already murdered five times.
On 13 March 1990 he moved into the Oxford Apartments.
During the next eighteen months he would kill twelve more victims, the last three in just over two weeks, between 5 July 1991 and 22 July 1991, when he was arrested.

After his seventh murder – that of a black homosexual named Eddie Smith on 14 June 1990 – Dahmer came very close to being caught again.
He invited a fifteen-year-old hispanic youth back to his apartment, but instead of drugging him, tried to knock him unconscious with a rubber mallet, then to strangle him.
The youth fought back, and somehow managed to calm his attacker.
Incredibly, Dahmer let him go, after making him promise not to notify the police.
But in hospital, the youth broke his promise.
However, when he begged the police not to let his foster parents know he was homosexual, they decided to do nothing about it.

Dahmer came to court in January 1992, charged with fifteen murders.
After being sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment, he commented: ‘I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there.
I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.’

Dahmer was murdered in Wisconsin jail on 28 November 1994.
He was hit on the head with an iron bar by fellow convict Christopher Scarver, who believed he was the Son of God.

Aileen Wuornos

Aileen (‘Lee’) Wuornos has been described as the world’s first female serial killer, but this is not strictly accurate.
To begin with, there have been others – Anna Zwanziger, Jeanne Weber, Belle Gunness.
But secondly, Aileen Wuornos was not a serial killer within the definition offered in this book: an obsessive ‘repeat killer’ driven by sex.
Her motive in killing seven men was robbery.

Two days before Christmas in 1989, two friends came upon a badly decomposed body in woods near Ormond Beach, Florida; it was identified as a 51-year-old electrician named Richard Mallory.
He had been shot four times with a .22 revolver.

During the next twelve months, five more victims were found in almost identical circumstances: David Spears, 43 (1 June 1990), Charles Carskaddon, 40 (6 June 1990), Troy Burress, 50 (4 August 1990), Charles Humphreys, 56 (12 September 1990), and Walter Gino Antonio (19 November 1990).
All had been killed in or near their cars, and money and valuables stolen.
The same handgun had been used in all six killings.
A 65-year-old part-time missionary, Peter Seims, had also vanished in early June.

On 4 July 1990, a car that was being driven too fast skidded off the road in Marion County, Florida, and ended in a field.
Witnesses saw two women, one tall and blonde, the other short and brunette, get out and hurry away.
The car proved to belong to the missing missionary, Peter Seims.
Sketches were made from the descriptions of witnesses, and published in the press.
Members of the public tipped off the police that the pair were probably Tyria (‘Ty’) J.
Moore, 28, and her live-in lover, 34-year-old Aileen (‘Lee’) Wuornos.

Then the police found some of the belongings of the first victim, Richard Mallory, in a pawn shop.
The pawn ticket bore a thumb print – obligatory in Florida – that proved to belong to Lee Wuornos.

Lee Wuornos was known as a hard-drinking butch lesbian who made a living as a prostitute, and spent her time playing pool in sleazy bars with long-haired motorcyclists.
She was arrested on 9 January 1991 outside a bar.
Tyria Moore was located at her sister’s home in Pennsylvania, but not arrested – the police had soon ascertained that she had been elsewhere at the time of most of the murders.

In return for immunity from prosecution as accessory after the fact, Ty led the police to the creek where Lee Wuornos had thrown the .22 revolver used in the murders.
She then made bugged phone calls to her lover, urging her to confess.
Lee, who was clearly deeply in love with Ty, finally agreed.
On 16 January 1991, she made a three-hour video-taped confession to murdering the seven men – including Seims, whose body was never found.

Aileen Carol Wuornos had been brought up by her grandfather and grandmother – in Troy, Michigan – whom she believed to be her real parents; she was unaware that her mother had deserted her when she was a baby.
She was also unaware that her true father was a child rapist who had hanged himself in prison.
Her mother walked out on her two babies because she was unable to cope.
Lee’s grandparents – both Finnish immigrants – were heavy drinkers, and her grandfather was a foul-tempered disciplinarian who turned her into a rebel who hated authority.
Lee herself was highly dominant, and had a quick temper.
At the age of eleven she lost her virginity to a local youth.
Then, discovering that sex gave her power over boys, she plunged into it with an enthusiasm that soon earned her a reputation as the neighbourhood tart.
She introduced her elder brother Keith to incest.
And one local boy was surprised – and delighted – when a pretty girl in shorts slipped him a note offering a ‘suck and fuck’ in exchange for a packet of cigarettes.
The eighteen-year-old youth who served in the local cigarette store often bartered a packet of cigarettes for oral sex in the back room.
When the young man boasted about it to a group of friends, he was mortified to learn that Lee had performed the same service for all of them earlier the same day.

When she was fourteen, Lee became pregnant – she claimed she had been raped by an older man, but this seems doubtful.
(Later she was even to name her brother as the baby’s father.) In the local maternity hospital, a caseworker made the memorable comment that Lee had ‘no concern for the future, only for what today would bring’.

Lee lacked self-control.
When she lost her temper, she poured out a stream of foul language.
She always carried a knife, and once, in a rage, screamed that she had already killed someone and chopped them up, then buried them in a field.
It was something of a relief to the rest of the family when she drifted down to Florida.

Married at the age of twenty to a man nearly 50 years her senior, she was soon divorced due to her habit of spending the whole day in bars playing pool.
At about this time, Aileen announced that she had discovered she was gay.
There followed an affair with a woman called Toni.
But her temper and her drunkenness made all her relationships brief.
When, in 1981, she robbed a late-night supermarket, netting $35, she received three years in a correctional centre.

When she finally left Michigan, after her brother’s death from cancer, she hitch-hiked to Colorado and quickly found her way to bars frequented by bikers.
She enjoyed the sensation of being a ‘biker’s moll’, a female outlaw riding on the back of a motorcycle and defying the world.
One night she passed out from alcohol, and woke to find herself naked and tied to a bed; the whole gang had taken advantage of her while she was unconscious.
Yet even this failed to upset her Bonnie-and-Clyde image of herself as the female outlaw.

For the next few years she continued to live out this image – working as a prostitute, getting arrested again and again for drink-driving, carrying a concealed weapon and brawling.
Then, in June 1986, she found what she had been looking for all her life – someone to love.

She met Tyria (pronounced Tyra) Moore in a gay bar in Daytona Beach.
Tyria was anything but good-looking, being overweight and big chinned, but she was stable, caring, and easy to get along with.
Ty and Lee were instantly attracted to one another, and that same night Ty took Lee back to her bedroom.
For almost three days they stayed in bed together, going out only to purchase a large dildo.

The relationship was basically that of man and wife, with Lee as the husband.
Ty was working as a motel maid but Lee made her give it up;
she
would support her.
Now, suddenly, she had an aim in life.
Ty was both her wife and her child, and evoked an unselfishness that Lee was probably unaware she possessed.

Yet although this relationship gave her life new meaning, there was one major problem.
A prostitute’s stock-in-trade is her physical attractiveness.
Now in her 30s, Lee was grossly overweight, and her face showed the ravages of her outbursts of fury.
It was becoming harder to pick up clients and she often accepted a mere $10 or $20 for sex.
Yet she often hitch-hiked with johns who obviously had hundreds of dollars in their wallets.
There was only one objection to turning highway-robber – that she would soon be recognised and caught.
But there was an alluring alternative: to kill them and then take their wallets.

The drama of Lee Wuornos’ story spawned two movies, an opera and several books before she was executed by lethal injection on 9 October 2002.
As she was lead out of the court, following her first conviction and death sentence in 1991, Wuornos had shouted: ‘I’m going to Heaven now.
You’re all going to Hell!’

Shortly after her death, an anonymous joker posted a message on a website that was hosting an online discussion about her execution.
Signed Satan, it simply read: ‘Umm . . .
Could you guys take her back?’

Fred and Rose West

The Frederick West murder case has aroused more worldwide interest than any British case since Jack the Ripper.

Fred West was a builder who lived in a semi-detached house in Gloucester, with his plump and bespectacled wife Rosemary, and a large number of children, three of them obviously half-caste.
A short, powerfully built man with piercing blue eyes and a simian profile, he was known as a hard worker, devoted to DIY, and was always adding extensions to their house, 25 Cromwell Street, where they had been living since September 1972.
In the early days the house had been full of lodgers, mostly men, although later lodgers were mainly female.

Between August 1992 and June 1993, Fred West had been in jail, accused of raping and sodomising one of his daughters, and the children were taken into care.
During this period, his eldest daughter, 28-year-old Anne Marie (whose mother was not Rose), described to Detective Constable Hazel Savage how she herself had been taken down to the basement at the age of eight by her stepmother and father, and deflowered with a vibrator.
Her father had started having sex with her when she was nine – on at least two occasions she had been held down by her stepmother Rose, on whom she had once been made to perform cunnilingus.
It seemed that Rose also worked as a prostitute – not primarily for profit, but because her husband liked to watch her having sex with other men – and when Anne Marie was ten, she had also been forced to prostitute herself to male clients.
(Many of these clients – particularly the black ones – were ‘freebies’, because Rose was as obsessed by sex as her husband was, and was virtually insatiable.) Anne Marie had finally run away from home when she was fifteen, after becoming pregnant by her father.
(The baby was aborted.)

Together with the evidence of the daughter who had been raped, this testimony of Anne Marie seemed to provide the police with a watertight case against both the Wests.
But aware of the misery of her half-brothers and sisters, who were longing to be home, Anne Marie finally withdrew her testimony.
The consequence was that when, on 17 June 1993, Fred and Rose West stood side by side in the dock in Gloucester, they were acquitted for lack of evidence.
(In fact, their acquittal did the younger children no good, for they were kept in care.)

It was a remark by one of these younger children that made Hazel Savage determined to pursue the case further.
The child was overheard to say that they were not allowed to talk about what went on inside 25 Cromwell Street, for fear of ‘ending up under the patio, like my sister Heather’.

Heather West, the oldest child of Fred and Rose West, had not been seen since June 1987, when she was sixteen.
According to the Wests, she had run away with a lesbian, and had gone to work in a holiday camp.
But she had left her unemployment benefit uncollected, which sounded unlikely for a girl about to embark on a new life.

Hazel Savage’s superiors were unhappy at the idea of digging up the Wests’ garden, for if they didn’t find anything, they might sue for harassment.
But the policewoman’s insistence finally prevailed, and on Thursday 24 February 1994, police arrived at 25 Cromwell Street with a search warrant.
Fred West was at work, repairing a roof, and was located with some difficulty.
He promised to come immediately, but in fact arrived many hours later – a delay that is still unexplained.
(The likeliest explanation is that he went to another of his murder sites to cover his tracks.) West hurried to the police station, and told a reporter he met outside that he had not murdered his daughter Heather.
Back at Cromwell Street, Rose was telling police that she had been out shopping when Heather had left home, so she had no first-hand knowledge of what had happened.

The Wests spent a gloomy night at 25 Cromwell Street, with a policeman sitting beside the excavation in the garden.
Two of their elder children, Stephen and Mae, were there to keep them company.